The problem of community I set out this morning to buy a fish a koi carp - golden, really gold, like glt, like thin slivers of pounded ore

- well you probably know them. Then it occurred to me it might die. Then again it could die on anyone who would buy it.

Then I thought I ought to get it a buddy; a black fish? or a second gold one? - though that might diminish the flash of the first.

While I was pondering this dilemma I noticed a sign: ’Not suited to indoor aquariums’; so the choice was made - not resolved, removed.

I set out to buy myself a fish in an effort to expand my basis of communication - this isn’t a joke you understand;

I was as serious about this fish as I was last Sunday when I tried the church. Why not, I thought; you might even find something, a sense of . . . belonging. So I ironed my skirt and set out. When I arrived the place was locked: shut up for summer like a shrink’s compassion.

So I decided to pop round to the pub to sit with my fellow women and men, but the place was so full of people,

there wasn’t a bum’s width of room to sit in. So I simply went home. . . . You see the problem.

KATIE CAMPBELL