For the last couple of months, there has been a new man in my life, one who is short, gold and handsome - and no, he's not one of the stolen Oscar statuettes. He's a remarkably attractive goldfish called Fun Bobby - "Bob" because that's the name he seems to be mouthing all day long, and "Fun" because he's not. Adopting a goldfish was quite an unusual move on my part because I've never seen the point of them before. Dogs give you limitless attention and indulge your ego; cats give you small fragments of their attention and indulge your ego, but goldfish don't do anything very much except "be", which does nothing for my ego whatsoever.
The change of heart leading to the acquisition of the fish was mainly for cosmetic reasons. I've always found feng shui astonishingly amusing, ever since a friend's mother arrived in our flat and squeaked: "Girls! A dead plant in your prosperity corner!" However, after three years of living in the same flat, I was beginning to suspect that all of our chi was hiding under the sofa for fear of being sent to the bottle bank with the weekend's empties. A water feature would sort me out, I decided and while I was at it, I could introduce some gold into my prosperity corner before the tax year was up.
Enter Fun Bobby, and all his acoutrements - bowl, stones, net, fish food and Stress Coat, a kind of fish Valium, I've been tempted to try myself recently. For a while, owning a fish was great gas altogether. The flatmate and I used to leave notes for each other on the blackboard in the kitchen saying "Fun Bobby says he'll meet you in the Clarence for cocktails around six" or "Jaws rang for Fun Bobby - didn't leave a number". I used to while away dull ad breaks making ghastly faces at him through the glass, content in the knowledge he'd have forgotten by the time er came back on. Whatever about luring the chi out of the broom cupboard, Fun Bobby certainly provided hours of innocent amusement.
Until last weekend, when I realised that I was spending rather a lot of time worrying about Fun Bobby. I seem to be constantly changing his water and feeding him, or else worrying about changing his water too much and over-feeding him. He's always either lurking at the bottom, doing nothing, or milling about as though he's at a thrash metal gig. Apparently this is all quite normal goldfish behaviour and nothing to be worried about. The real problem is that I've got rather sick of the whole goldfish thing and am beginning to sit on the far side of the living-room muttering darkly about kedgeree.
I'm well aware that this is an atrocious thing to admit. Fun Bobby never asked to be the latest decoration in my flat, once I'd exhausted Habitat's range of attractive throws, and although his powers of memory leave a lot to be desired, I know he's a living, breathing fish, not just an ornament. It's not that I'm feckless; rather I'm terribly aware that unless I supply the fish flakes and the oxygenated water, Fun Bobby is going to make like his name, and bob, lifeless, on top of the water. In other words, I've realised that Fun Bobby is a responsibility and I'm just not that good at responsibility.
Most of us have an interesting attitude towards being responsible. Some people seem to be addicted to it, volunteering left, right and centre to take the minutes at the residents' association, organise group holidays and generally be answerable for anything that might go wrong, ever. Others would rather eat razorblades than take on any kind of responsibility - the thought of having to explain away a possible disaster is enough to bring them out in hives.
I think I'm probably somewhere in between the two, with tendencies towards both extremes, resulting in a dangerous condition called Sporadic Irresponsibility Causing Chaos or SICC. Those suffering this common ailment are usually fairly responsible people - we pay bills, we put our bins out on the right day, we're no more than 10 minutes late to meet friends - until something really important comes up and this is when SICC kicks in. For example, if I need to be up at 6 a.m. for a flight, I get an almost pathological compulsion to book a table at Renards night-club for 2 a.m. - four hours before.
If somebody tells me I can borrow any of their clothes except the pale yellow skirt, I will suddenly find myself wearing said skirt heading out to on a paint-balling expedition. If somebody says: "Whatever you do, don't be late", I will fully intend to be on time, but find it imperative to clean my blinds for the first time ever, five minutes before the appointment. My poor sister, who recently returned from New Zealand for a holiday, managed to negotiate half the globe without incident until she arrived at my flat for breakfast. I had been looking forward to her return for weeks, so why was I fast asleep in a friend's flat on the other side of town, having failed to set an alarm clock properly?
SICC is an affliction that seems to particularly affect twenty-somethings. In terms of life stages, we're awkwardly teetering between the teen years when the words "you have to . . ." are like a red rag to a bull, and the rest of your life when you have pensions, mortgages, careers and family pets to think about. Responsibilities begin to grow on us like lichen - having a mortgage is now trendier than having your own website and people who would have been plotting how to dodge the dole inspector 10 years ago are now plotting how to dodge the knock-on effects of the economic depression in Asia. Most of us manage to meet the challenge most of the time, but there are occasions when we do the most appallingly stupid things just because we know we really, really shouldn't. It's not that we plan to rebel, to wear the dry-clean-only skirt out in a rain storm, to forget about the client waiting in reception while we go out to lunch, to feed the goldfish parmesan cheese, it's just that some subconscious part of our brain rebels and says "shan't".
Still, I've stopped worrying quite so much about my SICC since talking to a friend who had moved on a step in life. "When will I ever learn to be responsible?" I moaned. At which point she removed a fire-lighter from her young son's mouth and said, "When you have children". Right enough, I imagine it's hard to be irresponsible when the person you're messing around is a small thing with all the self-protection abilities of a currant bun. Fun Bobby just doesn't even come close.
So run out and buy the biggest bunch of flowers for your mother tomorrow - she has had to be responsible for an awfully long time, when maybe all she really wanted to do was go dancing, join the circus or mince the darned goldfish.