Finally, the scales have fallen from my eyes

So that's it. No more arguments. Fish do feel pain. Three biologists working at Edinburgh's Roslin Institute report finding 58 receptors located on or around the heads of rainbow trout which respond pretty much as our receptors do when someone sticks a hook in our mouth, throws a net over our face, tweaks our nose, or otherwise delivers us a personal insult. Whether or not fish take offence or blush we will have to wait a little longer for scientists from the Roslin Institute to discover. But at least that's pain sorted.

There will, needless to say, be those who demur from these findings. Already, doubt is being cast on the credentials of an institute that has a woman's name. Why not just call it the Pansy Institute and have done? Nor has it slipped their notice that one of the researchers is a Mr Gentle.

Anglers, of course. But then what would you expect? Myself, I only have to see an angler and my flesh creeps. It's the smug self-containment. The uncommunicativeness. The absorption in unhealthy inactivity. To say that what they're really up to is a watery form of onanism, the rod an extension penis, the basket the womb they wish they'd never left, is to state the obvious. Shout "Filthy bastard!" to an angler from a passing car and he'll jump just as you did when you were 13 and had forgotten to lock your bedroom door.

As for their contention that they mean no harm, that the fish they're prodding with their members feel no pain and that they wouldn't angle for them if they did, that is just as easily disproved as the argument that masturbation produces no ill effects. In both cases I ask you to look into the perpetrator's eyes. Dulled with guilt and shame, would you not say? Glazed over, listless, without colour. In other circumstances we know the profile of the angler well. Solitary, introverted, obsessive, incapable of making friends and a mystery to his neighbours. Isn't that the description police release whenever there's a serial killer on the loose?

But there they are allowed to sit in their hundreds of thousands, still attached to their placentas, jerking their umbilical lines on the banks of every canal and river in the country, so many serial murderers, or at the very best – thinking of those who make a thing of throwing back – so many serial sadists and molestors. Deniers of the pain they cause, though pain is what they're in it for.

Mistrust it wherever you encounter it – the refusal of the privileges of pain to other forms of life, and the appropriation of it only to your own.

As someone who has more than the usual number of agony receptors in every part of his body, I feel neither possessive of my particular pain nor niggardly in regard to other creatures'. Unlike inflated reputations or egregious wealth, pain is not something I begrudge. Let's all agree to have some, I say. Let's share it. And if it turns out that the more apparently inanimate the being, the greater the suffering of which it is capable, I will not be surprised. Dogs are sadder than men; cats are so excruciated they will not even talk about it; birds appear trapped in some terrible species-confusion – only listen to a parrot – so why shouldn't fish have the worst time of the lot?

As chance would have it, I visited the London Aquarium only last week. My partner's treat. "You need to see fish," she told me. I didn't question that. A man should never argue with a woman who understands his needs. Agree to fish today and you don't know what want she'll satisfy tomorrow.

And in this instance she was right. I did need fish. Not to be soothed. I don't hold with the theory that watching living things less complicated than yourself is calming. In my experience it doesn't soothe the soul; it agitates it. Either you end up envying the fish their seeming quietude, or you are struck by the similarity of their routine to yours. "Is that all my life amounts to, going round and round with my face in someone else's behind, opening and closing my mouth in the hope that an atom of plankton will float my way? Is that the story of my career?" Whereas if you approach fish expecting to be unsettled, you have a chance of learning something. Which was exactly what happened on this visit. I stood sullen at the window of the tank, peered down into the bottom where all the creepiest fish hang out, and saw a terrible flaw in creation.

It was a flat fish that caught my attention. Don't ask me to tell you its make. I am unable to identify individual fish. Fillet of monkfish, cod in batter, rollmop herring and smoked salmon – that's the limit of my taxonomy. But it was a big flat fish, about four times the size of my laptop, and half as thin. Anonymous it seemed, looking down on it, a greyish brown, with a couple of ancient gills, like alligator eyes, on its back. It was when it came off the bottom of the tank, though, and showed its underside, that the horror of its individuation became apparent. A face! Not the normal snouty face of a fish, but a round flat face, like a human's, or, rather, like the ghost of a human's, dead white, with hooded eyes and a hideous cherubic mouth, fleshly lips, almost kissable if you have a taste for kissing death, pouting, panting, washed of its muscles by the water, but still seeming to crave speech.

Ghostly, it shivered its scaly shroud. But whose ghost was it? What soul in torment was trapped in the flattened body of this fish? Or is this where we all go, to the very bottom of the sea, to inhabit for our carnal sins a worse than nothingness, a mockery of face and body, an eternal silence in the slime?

And you think that in this fishy hell we'll feel no pain!