In spite of being a slight menagerie for scary beetles and refugee geckos our water bungalow is very nice. It has a high thatched roof and a little balcony (where I often sit to write my blog) overlooking the Indian Ocean. Sometimes a long-legged, long-beaked white bird stands stock still on a little clump of rocks nearby. It's like he's spying on us but thinks that if he doesn't move we won't see him. He is a little sinister. I think he might be working for the Germans.

Don't worry, the gecko is in the bathroom on the other side of the building. He's safe in his gecko ghetto. And I better not take this any further before the metaphor becomes distasteful (though I might have come up with an idea for a children's book there where the atrocities of Nazi Germany are explained via noble birds attacking lizards at the insistence of their German overlords). I told you it would get distasteful. In my book it would be good to be a lizard. I'm not being all David Icke about it. People wouldn't understand.

Anyway, the room is great, much nicer and brighter than the slightly cave like place we stayed in on the first night (that feels like a long time ago - sitting by a pool reading books and playing Countdown is my life now - I don't really remember the time before and I assume it will go on forever). But there's a picture on the wall that is freaking me out a bit. If technology does its job it should be attached to this blog (if not I will post it up when/if I get home). It shows tow dead-eyed, snuggle-toothed rainbow coloured fish coming together, lips forward about to… what? Kiss each other? That's a bit weird in itself. Do fish kiss? They have nice thick, human-like lips. Is it meant to be sensual? Sexy even? Because for me the sexiness is greatly diminished by their being fish and having scary, stary fish eyes. If you're turned on by that then you're a pervert. Is it there to turn people off? To stop honeymooners procreating?

Their fish human mouths are open and their blue human tongues are poised to shoot out. It's pretty full on. I am not against the idea of fish kissing or having sex, but I think they should do it in the privacy of their own schools (it's OK that means something else in fish land) and it should not be displayed on a wall for my perverted delectation. Because I don't delecate it. I said. I find it repulsive. Alluringly repulsive. What happens next? Why are they frozen like this forever. Show us the next bit.

More worryingly I wonder if the fish are actually about to eat each other. It's a fish eat fish world out there as we discovered to our psychological torment when we had to fish for fish using fish as bait. Are their eyes so milkily blank and impassive because they are both moving in for the kill. Which fish will succeed in eating the other? Will they just both manage to tear a few chunks out of the mouth of their prey before being left with flapping holes of half human-fish lip and half gaping wound, their blue tongues floating away in an explosion of blood? This is more disturbing than the kissing and any person who gets off on imagining the billowing redness of the frenzied assault is even sicker than the man sadly wanking over the snogging fish while his wife is having a massage, as Hendyng says. Both of those men should be ashamed of themselves. Whoever they are.

Another interpretation is that this is just one fish which has just been attacked by a mad fisherman and has been sliced from tail to human lips and is bifurcating around its mouth. And the fisherman not content with killing the fish is pushing the two bits together so it looks like its kissing itself. Maybe it's still conscious, like some of the traitors who were executed in Henry VIII's time and the executioner is having fun humiliating and torturing his victim before it dies. "You're kissing yourself! You're gay!" That kind of thing (I don't approve of the executioner's misplaced piscine homophobia, but he is also a fish murderer which is surely a worse crime, let's get this into some kind of perspective, please).

Maybe it's just fish that has encountered a mirror. Let's hope so. But then it obviously doesn't realise the reflection is itself and is still trying to mount/eat it, so it doesn't really get us out of any of the moral quandaries that surely the artist intended to dredge up within us.

Whatever the case. It's really fucking ugly and a horrible thing to have to wake up to (and to attempt to masturbate over) and I am going to be very glad to get out of this Hell-hole and back to Shepherd's Bush where someone else kills my fish for me and no one then depicts that murder/rape/whatever in a garish painting that they put by my bed.

[ Email this edition of Warming Up to a friend ]