Thursday 21 March 2013

Farewell Seacombe Aquarium


The out of town retail park aquarium. A new phenomenon that accounted for the dwindling numbers here in Seacombe. He’d been there a few years ago. On the road out to Wirral. A blank, corrugated structure sandwidged between a cavernous shoe supermarket and a many-aisled sports megastore.

The vast tank in there stretched upward to an indeterminate point of bright, white light: A dilute impression of infinity, dispelled as a trick of refraction each second hour, when a backlight flicked on beyond the disappointingly proximate water surface. The clumsy flippers of a foolhardy frogman would descend from a small jetty, gurning within his scuba mask at dumbfounded onlookers as he hand-fed the sharks frozen fish.

To fully appreciate its vulgarity, Godfrey bade me conjure the structure without its associated walls and water. Imagine, in mid air, those sharks circling above a car park in the north west of England, for an audience whose primary intent that morning had been to find a new pair of shoes.

Godfrey shook his head and stared at a vast brown trout in the opposite tank; motionless but for the slow, sad blinking of its eye.

A great fear nagged at him, for whatever it might imply, said Godfrey, that beside Plank's or Newton's constants, it might be as easy to determine - via summation of a species' mean intelligence - the safe distance at which a hand is able to place its pet, from the borders of what it might otherwise recognise as freedom.