Breaking the ice with my garden goldfish

THE cold weather came back last week but I was a bit better prepared for it this time.

I wrote [January 11] about how the last cold snap, which started in December, had presented me with a problem about breaking the ice on my fish pond without causing damage or stress to the fish. Afterwards several readers kindly emailed me with the correct solution to the problem.

What you do is boil up a large kettle or saucepan of water, place it on the ice and wait until it melts a circular hole. You them remove it and float something like a light rubber ball in the water – the idea is that the ball drifts around in the breeze and keeps the hole ice free.