It ALL began with a horrified scream from the kitchen.

It was from my wife Kate, who then shouted with urgent desperation: “Tim, please, come here, Tim, quick!”

I had no idea what had happened, but it was clearly an emergency.

I rushed into the kitchen to find my wife standing next to the cooker in a state of near-panic, holding a jug.

“It’s Goldie, she’s behind the cooker!”

It took me a few moments to process this information. Goldie is our goldfish (I know, it’s not a very original name. I had wanted to call her Pisces, but I was outvoted by the kids).

“She’s behind the cooker?” I questioned.

“Yes, please Tim, can you move the cooker?”

I did the worst thing possible in such a crisis. I asked for an explanation when only immediate action was required.

“Why is she behind the cooker?”

“She jumped there… Tim, please!”

“Jumped there?”

“Yes, I was transferring her in this jug, as I always do while cleaning her tank, and she just, well, leapt out, and flew over the kitchen and fell behind the cooker. Tim, please, will you pull the cooker out? She may still be alive.”

Kate was deeply distressed and, of course, she was right: Goldie could still be alive.

So I began the rescue operation, pulling the cooker away as fast as I safely could.

I couldn’t get it completely out because of the connecting cable, but enough to allow us to peer down into the recess where Goldie had fallen.

There was no sign of her. Minutes were passing as we searched fruitlessly.

The children’s distress was growing, as was Kate’s. My quick-thinking teenage daughter brought a torch and we shone it under the cabinets. Still no sign.

More minutes passed and I was reaching the point of giving up hope of finding her alive. But Kate was insistent there was still hope.

She shone the torch in the opposite corner: “There, look, there she is, please Tim, get her.”

I peered into the semi-darkness and saw the tip of her tail, or her caudal fin, as my daughter later corrected my terminology.

But it wasn’t moving and, as I squeezed between the gap to reach down for her, I feared we were too late.

I carefully lifted her from under the cabinet and cupped her gently in the palm of my hand.

Then she sprang into life and jumped into the air!

Fortunately, I caught her in my other hand and quickly returned her to the bowl she’d been kept in temporarily as her tank was cleaned.

She swam frantically in circles for a few moments, then stopped moving. Our hearts sank as she did. We spoke to her, giving words of encouragement, willing her to recover.

And suddenly she did. Soon she was back in her tank swimming happily.

Well that’s how it seemed. I don’t know if fish remember trauma, or if the popular idea that a goldfish has a three-second memory is true. My subsequent research suggests not.

I know many will laugh and say it’s just a fish, and of course on the scale of suffering and loss we see in the world just now, it could be said a goldfish’s life is utterly insignificant.

But on reflecting on my wife’s compassion for Goldie, I was reminded of the words of Albert Einstein, who described what he called a delusional prison which humans make for themselves, in which our thoughts and feelings are separated from the rest of the world, “restricting us to our personal desires and to affection for a few persons nearest to us”.

He goes on to argue that “our task must be to free ourselves from this prison by widening our circle of compassion to embrace all living creatures…”

Goldie’s near-death experience reminded me of this truth.

Cruelty and indifference to suffering is sadly a very human trait, and it’s caused when we draw a line to the limits of our compassion.

For some people, that line may be a goldfish; for others, any animal at all; for other people, it may include humans whose suffering is not deemed worthy of our compassion.

St Francis of Assisi lived hundreds of years before us, yet he illuminated it perfectly: “If you have men who will exclude any of God’s creatures from the shelter of compassion and pity, you will have men who will deal likewise with their fellow men.”

I don’t think you have to be Catholic, a Christian, or even a believer in God to agree with this.

By the way, a week has passed since Goldie’s behind-the-cooker adventure and she’s still swimming happily.