If you ever visit Thailand there is an an interesting ritual to be tried - namely feeding the fish.
It is usually carried out on the grounds of Buddhist monasteries, but not always. You pay a small sum for a bag of fish food (large enough to throw, not the sort of stuff that drifts through your fingers into your home aquarium). You then stand on a bridge, or at the end of a jetty, or simply on a ledge, observe where you think that the fish are, and start throwing the food in their direction.
There are large shoals of them, they come at you from all directions, and they are competitive!
Spread around your aim, and if you want some real fun, aim the food into what looks like an empty space. You will soon realise how empty it is - not!
The Buddhists see this as good karma, apparently. It is also pleasing, given that most of us look upon fish as food and little else. And for once, to put in a good word for religion (cough, splutter), Christianity, Judaism and Islam all emphasise the importance of relationships between humans and other creatures. Noah did not just take humans on the ark, for instance (though where he found his kangaroos and kiwis and iguanas and bald eagles is a good question .....).
In 2008 when I came out of hospital after my heart bypass operation, my wife decided that some similar form of karmic experience was needed here. As there is nowhere round here to buy large bags of fish food, nor a place where they congregate (in fact fish being offered food round here usually find that there is a hook, a line, and a rod fastened to it!), we decided to buy a loaf of bread from the local supermarket and go down to the Main to feed the ducks.
I did this for several days. Fun to watch the competitive nature of the ducks in action. Until one day one of the local residents came and told me that it was illegal!
It takes some believing that feeding bread to ducks on a river is illegal (don't the local politicians have something better to do with their time?), but apparently there is a local by-law which stops you doing this. I did not quite pick up what the resident was telling me (Hessisch does not always sound like German), but I think that he said something about rats - surely cannot be correct, I must have misheard. Rats, and throwing bread to feed ducks in the river? Where is the connection?
Not sure how these local by-laws apply. Today I may well have done summat illegal again (unaware of the fact while doing so). There is a park in the area close to where all the major banks are situated in the city centre. I went down today armed with a couple of 2-day-old croissants that we no longer needed, sat on a bench and started feeding these to a couple of ravens and one solitary pigeon, who were the only birds around to be seen.
No problems so far with the authorities, but if I am missing from this blog for the next few days, I may be serving a short sentence for illegal conduct. Fines? Nothing to pay them with, so I might get to find out what Lindsay Lohan almost started to suffer!
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