rhythmaning | A Good Day Out

I have taken a couple of days of work, it being Easter and all – my wife is a teacher (among many other skills!), and she is on holiday now, so it is good to spend some time together.

We decided to go to Deep Sea World, an aquarium complex north of Edinburgh – across the Forth. It is quite out of the way, nestling beneath the web-like structure of the wonderful Forth Bridge (the model for Iain Bank’s “The Bridge”).

We were there quite early – which was good, because it already seemed crowded. I had never been before, though my wife had taken her classes there (although not for five years or so). It being the school holidays, it was full of small kids; although being taller meant I could ~~push them out of the way~~ look over their heads. Mostly they were well behaved – not tapping on the glass or otherwise annoying the creatures they had come to stare at.

The various fish were beautiful, though that is really the extent of my views: I don’t know much about fish, and I can’t say I actually learnt a great deal. There were different tanks for different aquatic environments: several different tropical tanks, including some really beautiful tropical corals – stunningly beautiful. (I have swum in tropical seas a few times, snorkelling, to look at coral; but I can’t wear my glasses and a face mask, so the fish and the coral I recall as being very blurred – one of the few situations that make me wish I wore contact lenses!)

There were also temperate tanks, and the children were encouraged to touch some of the fish, controlled by an attendant in a wetsuit. I bet the fish loved that!

Another tank held a school of piranha, and although I keep being told that they are not as vicious as they look (both by David Attenborough on a recent “Planet Earth”, and by the blurb next to the tank), they still look bloody vicious to me: stubby jaws with lots of teeth and big stomachs.

The highlight of the visit was a hundred metre underwater Perspex tunnel. We went through this a couple of times, gazing in awe at the fish swimming around us. There were various sharks (even though the Perspex – seven centimetres thick – distorts like a lens, so that the object appear a two-thirds of their actual size, the sharks still looked bloody big to me!), rays, conger eels, and a myriad of other large (and smaller) fish. I don’t know how the smaller fish felt like swimming with sharks – I wonder how the visitors would feel if a shark decided it was teatime whilst they were walking past. There were a lot of crustaceans, too, hiding in cracks and crevices. (The only thing I wanted to see but didn’t were squid or octopi; they are beautiful creatures – there is a rather sad aquarium in Mallaig, where we once sheltered from a heavy downpour, which had many different octopi).

After watching the fish for a long while, we decided that we would like to eat them. Well, that wasn’t actually what we decided – it didn’t quite go like that, but that was the outcome: we went to lunch at the Shore. The irony wasn’t lost on us, though perhaps that is why my wife chose to have the vegetarian risotto rather than reduce the fish population still further. (On the other hand, by the time it makes the menu, the fish have already been caught, so I wasn’t really doing any more damage…) It was a lovely meal – I had sardines and mussels, and we got through a lovely bottle of Macon Villages.

We then followed this with a few whiskies at the Vaults, before staggering home along the Water of Leith.

A good day out!