In the UK. A childhood friend of mine used to buy goldfish and feed them to his pet snakes. Couldn’t do that now:

Buying a goldfish at a pet shop used to be an innocent childhood pleasure.

But today an elderly pet shop owner told how she was ‘entrapped’ into selling a goldfish to a 14-year-old schoolboy, then warned she could face jail.

She had breached a law introduced in 2006 which bans selling live fish to anyone under 16.

After a prosecution estimated to have cost taxpayers £20,0000, Joan Higgins, 66, a great-grandmother who has never been in trouble before, has been forced to wear a tag on her ankle like common criminal and given a seven-week curfew.

But you can do this:

More abortions are carried out in Britain than any other country in Europe, research has shown.

Half of all pregnancies among girls under 18 in Britain end in abortion.

The figures, collated by a European pressure group, showed that the 219,336 abortions carried out in England, Wales and Scotland in 2007 topped the 209,699 in France to put Britain at the top of the abortion count for the first time.

No need to worry, though, as long as we keep the goldfish safe.