In the huge circular fish tank in the Sea Creature Centre four hundred humble herrings swam diligently anticlockwise – except for one solitary fish that swam against the rest. It was the piscatorial equivalent of driving up the wrong side of the street. Two decades later, this writer still wonders : why did it do it?

By Dylan Winter

Some tiny incidents have the power to haunt you for a lifetime. Like pinpricks of rust on a car they blister and grow with the years. Mine involved a fish. A humble herring. The image of that fish has been rattling around my head for the last 20 years. I see no reason why it should not accompany me to the grave.
I was up in the northwest of Scotland near Oban where the countryside is pockmarked with billboards cajoling tourists to tour tweed spurtling mills or Trossachs knitting factories. Usually I am completely blind to such blandishments. But it was raining. Which is how I came to be walking around the Sea Creature Centre.
These places have sprung up all around Britain’s coast but this was the first ever. I presume some double-breasted marketing wiz got hold of the concept and franchised it out. Probably retired to Tuscany by now.
For all that, the idea remains a good one: catch a few local fish and crabs, bung them in tanks, open a snack bar and charge the gawking public an entrance fee. What could be simpler?
Being the first of its kind, this place had a pleasant nip-and-tuck feel to it. The building had once done service as a farmer’s barn. Nets and floats were strung from the ceilings, the walls were decorated with crudely painted fish and the café even sold locally made food – fish pies, pasties, proper chips.
The tanks contained confused crabs, gaping clams and an infinite number of snail-like creatures. There was a small display about salmon farming and a giant black plastic tank with hundreds of halibut lying in the bottom ogling back into the curious faces of the public.
The centrepiece of the whole show was a magnificent six-metre-diameter glass doughnut called “The Herring Ring”. You could stand in the middle and watch the four hundred herrings diligently swimming anticlockwise around the tank.
Except the one that was going in the opposite direction.
A hell of a time it was having. Ducking and weaving, dipping and diving in a constant attempt to avoid colliding with the 399 fish going the other way. It was the piscatorial equivalent of driving up the wrong side of the highway.
I stood and watched top see how long it would be before it gave up and started swimming with the flow. It didn’t. Five, 10, 15 minutes passed and it was still at it. I had a cup of tea and read the newspaper. When I came back to look, there it was – still heading the ‘wrong’ way.
At one side of the room stood an attendant. He was a man in his fifties with the same blank expression shared by all in his profession. His sort have overheard every inane, stupid or crass comment the public is capable of making.
I walked over, stood beside him and gestured in the direction of the herring ring.
‘That fish,’ I said.
‘Aye,’ came the reply.
‘Does it always swim the wrong way?’
‘Aye.’
‘How long has it been doing that?’
‘From the second day it arrived here at the Centre,’ he said without even looking in my direction. ‘That’s two years now.’
I thought for a moment. Okay, it took longer than a moment to work out that at one revolution per minute, in a year they would go around the tank almost half a million times. That clockwise fish really knew how to stick to its principles.
‘Is this the first batch of herrings?’ I asked.
‘Fourth,’ came the reply.
‘Ever been another one like it? Swimming the wrong way, I mean?’
‘In every batch …’ he paused, milking the statement for every ounce of drama before portentously adding, ‘so far.’
‘I suppose I am not the first to notice the fish, am I?’
‘Third today, sir,’ he said.

Two decades have passed, and that damn fish continues to rattle in my head. I have spent a lot of time in traffic jams, in bed at night and standing in line at the post office ruminating about its motives.
Perhaps the clockwise fish was going back to see where all the other herrings came from. Maybe it was selflessly acting as a sort of marker so that the other fish could keep a tally of how many circuits they hade made – counting off the millions the way a condemned man scratches marks on the wall of his cell.
What would happen if all the fish saw sense and started swimming his way? Would he turn and swim against the shoal? What if he had been born a goldfish and lived alone in a bowl? How could a lonely goldfish show its individuality?
I honed it down to one of two possible explanations. Either the fish was made or it was merely acting as a conduit for a message from God.
Madness is an attractively simple explanation. Assume that the fish has a wire loose in its brain and the problem is solved. But the attendant said that there had been four such fish – one in each tank. For all I know there could have been 10 more batches since I was there. Too much of a coincidence. Ask a mathematician to work it out.
So that leaves us with God. But what does the message mean?
I have no answers.
There are two more things about the story. One concerns the three people who asked about the fish the day I was there. I rang the Centre and discovered that on a good wet midsummer’s day they would average between 800 and 1 200 visitors. About one in 400 visitors was sufficiently interested in the fish to ask a few questions – which is uncannily close to the ratio of clockwise to anticlockwise fish.
One other thing. It concerns the fate of the herrings once the decision has been made to replace them with a new batch.
Remember those locally produced pies and pastries. No exceptions were made – even for the one in 400.
So what price individualism now? And how come so many people think that the song My Way was written just for them?

About the Author

Dylan Winter is a freelance radio journalist, whose gentle story of a wayward herring won first prize in a literary competition run by the British newspaper, The Independent. The judges found the story original and quirky and commented that it grows on you with each new reading.