Hundreds and hundreds of them! Joyous, exuberant, brilliantly-coloured fish of many sizes, many shapes, swarming and swirling and thrusting their way eastward along the fence, just as their real-life counterparts are now doing in the Fraser River down below.

Every fish is different, every fish is individually painted according to the lights of each individual painter, and yet, all of them are artfully arranged into a community with a single interest - by colour groups, or according to whether they have hearts on them, or sunsplashes, or bones.

There's even a school of fish on this fish fence beside a school! All praise to the children who painted them, to the teachers and other adults who conceived this brilliant idea and inspired the children to execute it, and even to any of the rest of us capable, in this grim time of pollution and corruption and murder and war, of slowing down, taking in this stunning art exhibits and allowing our spirits to soar.

I was a teacher myself once, so allow me an academic moment. One of the saddest and most beautiful poems in English is Coleridge's, Dejection: An Ode.

My genial spirits fail, he says, and the reason is that he has lost this capacity to feel joy - this beautiful and beauty-making power. He can't feel beauty any more, and therefore, he can't make beauty. Well, what these kids and teachers at ESR have done is make beauty, on a plain old chain-link fence, and we have to thank them for it.

Coleridge also provided the best definition of beauty I have ever come across: the simultaneous intuition of the relation of parts, each to each, and of all to a whole. Or, more plainly, the beautiful is that in which the many, still seen as the many, becomes one.

That may sound abstruse and academic, but I am not aware of any challenges more pressing than our society's need to honour individuals and individualism and individuality, while at the same time recognizing that whatever it is that we are all in these days, we are all in it together.

And if we want to get out of it (as, for example, we want to get out from under the dark shadow of SE2), we all have to pull together to do so. And here are all these kids, every one of them doing his or her own thing, and yet every one of them working towards a common purpose - the fish project!

I heard there was an attempt to vandalize the fish fence, almost as soon as it was put up, but when I went down there the next day, I could see no signs of damage. It had been fixed.

So there's a lesson for the kids too: there's a cult of ugliness out there, people who for whatever reason seem to be threatened by beauty and beautiful things. So what's the appropriate response? Well, you could get angry, or discouraged, or you could fall into dejection. But what they did at ESR was give them more beauty.