THIS IS WHAT IT IS ALL ABOUT

None of us have all of the answers, and it would be a foolish man who claimed to know more than a tiny fraction of the secrets of the universe. I certainly never claim to know everything, and that lamentable lack of knowledge on my part caused a little fishy tragedy earlier. But luckily the ever more complex machine that is the CFZ Family came to my rescue.

I bought some Mikrogeophagus ramirezi at the fish auction the other day. I didn't buy them for the CFZ collection - I merely bought them for myself because they are the prettiest fish I know, and one of my all-time favourites.

But yesterday they started dying, and I lost four of them. It turned out to be a pH issue that had escaped us, but how did we find out? Emma, Maxy and I were stumped, but it turns out that Fleur's mother lives next door to a lady from the British Cichlid Association who managed to sort it all out for me, and the fishies seem happy.

But there is a moral in this story (and it is not that I should dop water tests more regularly). It is that the whole CFZ Family is bigger than the sum total of all its constituent parts. That we can achieve magnificent things if we all pull together as a team, and that we tend to screw up mightily when we don't.

I could continue. Indeed, I could continue at length. But I won't. Have you ever known me to labour a point?