Is your club working?

by Jim Kelly
of  the U.K. Fancy Guppy Association
Aquarticles.com

Scope for greater participation by club members is what is required if the organised hobby is to help meet the future problem of more leisure time for more people.

Is your fishkeeping a leisure time pursuit or has it turned into a job of work? Before you answer quickly, take a long, clear, uninterrupted look at this hobby of ours: after the flush of something new, has it turned as sour as last week's milk? Is what used to be a pleasant activity now a job of work?

That last word merits some consideration first of all. You would have thought that the idea that work can be fun would have been killed off during the Industrial Revolution or pre-war depression. We cannot class our labours as a pleasure when we still find it difficult to convince the majority of aquatic club membership that work was once regarded as being the nearest thing to prayer.

Yet it is no longer the distant future that promises an age when the automaton and the machine free us even more for leisure time activities. Compare the weekly working hours of just a decade ago with the hours worked in industry today; like the drip of water on a large rock, the whittling down has seemed an awfully slow process.

Thinking people are already examining the future problem posed by the 'leisure question' and what a switch it will be for most of us brought up and taught to think differently on this subject. To be able to fill the gap of leisure time intelligently may be the final aim of our civilisation. Two decades after the commencement of our calendar saw Seneca, the teacher to the Roman Emperor Nero, saying: 'Leisure without study is death; it is the tomb of the living man'.

Already our children are enjoying entertaining education and both of these words are rapidly merging into leisure; education, no longer boring, is becoming discovery-and that's where we fishkeepers and especially those involved in the running of aquatic bodies must jump on the band wagon.

Our hobby, though boasting many juniors within its ranks, has never really had a large junior membership. We may make the excuse in the embryo stages of keeping fish that the tank ' is just for the kids', but as with the Christmas train set, it is Dad who gets the biggest kick. Why don't we look at children more seriously? Their natural curiosity, their refusal to involve themselves in things that don't interest them, is a lesson to be learned.

Take the average aquarium club. It is held together by just a handful of 'workers' and a lot of followers. The 'few' change from time to time but, generally, if I could take my pick of half a dozen or so people from each society, all over the British and American scene, I could by removing them wipe out the organised hobby overnight.

And the strange fact is that the fault lies with those doing most of the work! Today folk are crying out for roles that require involvement, not the involvement of jobs (that's too much like work) but tasks of their own making and suited to their own talents.

Those club organisers mollycoddle their membership, with the adage if you want something doing properly do it yourself, until so lulled into a sense of false security the bulk of the hobbyists cannot cope when the machinery grinds to a halt.

What happened to all that curiosity we had as youngsters? We become so wrapped up in our own little local pools, trying desperately to solve our own little problems we forget that these same problems are also common to the larger hobby pool outside.

But then who should blame us? A lifetime of dreary work, boring jobs and bad education knocked it all out of the older generation. Compare the school lesson of today with that of the past, or a modern aquatic speaker and his host of visual aids with the speaker of 20 years ago. Entertainment has become education, work has become learning.

Let the organised hobby benefit from it all and let us decide here and now to change the face of our club life to that of discovery and investigation. The club project must replace the old lesson. The mere building up of greater society membership isn't what's required. Give every member a job but ensure it is something that he or she wants and has the talent to do properly.

Then the organised side of the hobby of keeping fish will hit the top of the charts.

Sounds familiar eh?