There have been developments on the fish front; good news/bad news, I'm afraid.

Craig called in to a different aquatic shop on the way home last night and took another water sample in – apparently Craig wasn’t impressed with the shop I went to on Saturday. He said that they employ young kids that know nothing about fish! Actually I think he has a point – not that it would have changed what has happened to any great extent or changed the fact we’ve lost another fish in the night.

Basically the pump we have isn’t big enough for the tank - there has been a slow build up of nitrate in the water over the year and it's reached critical levels - which is poisoning the fish and although we’ve now treated the water and got it back to a safe level, chances are some more of the fish will still die as the poison is in their systems. The nitrate comes from the food we feed them and the waste they produce; which obviously goes straight back into the water they live in.

So the good news is we now know what is causing the problem but all we’ve done really is treat the symptoms, we haven’t addressed the cause. For the size tank we have and the number of fish we had, we need an external pump; one that takes the water out of the tank, cleans it, and then puts in back in again.

And the bad news? Well the sort of pump we need costs well over £100 and we can’t really justify spending that sort of company money on the fish. We had a search on ebay and put a bid in of £25.00 on a second hand one – but with those sort of pumps costing so much I think the bids will go above what we've got available to spend. So we've got to keep searching all the local papers, ebay etc. until we find one that we can afford and try our hardest to ensure that we keep their water as safe as possible until then.