Shared Opinion

16 May 2009

All that has really changed is that we’re all angry now. It isn’t just students who are cross

The public looks to the Commons today, and sees a prejudice confirmed. They did the same with the Met police after the G20 baton charges, and the same with the City after Fred Goodwin’s pension, and all that has changed is the intensity of the anger. That’s the real story here. Anger, growing. Pulling on its boot and looking for the next arse to kick. Whose will it be?

Duck sex. It worries me. Last week, on Camden Road, just outside the dry-cleaners, I stopped and stared and watched seven mallards try to rape another mallard. She got away, but I doubt she’ll have got far. They weren’t in the mood for giving up, those ducks. You could see it in the set of their feathered brows. Beaks curled into hard and brutal leers.

I’d forgotten about this sort of thing. I used to see it a lot. When I was at university, the cloisters of my college were an avian sado-masochist pleasure dungeon. Take it from me, Emmanuel College, Cambridge was a bad place for female ducks. They’re evil little buggers, mallard drakes. Well, maybe not buggers. Hard to tell. You’d see them all, nodding their sinister green heads at each other, as some sprightly brown duckess wandered around the corner of the library, blue flash glinting innocently in the sun. Then they’d be off, and fast, moving with a rapist’s waddle, like the boys who follow the other boy into the greenhouse in that borstal film starring Ray Winstone.

You’d hear quacks, and then screams. You’d run around the corner and find one gripping her head with his beak as the others climbed on and off, all the while dodging kicks from shrieking and outraged students of Feminist Critical Theory. The ducklings were cute, but the making of them always shook me to my moral base. I think I’d blacked it out. Now it all comes flooding back.

In 2005, I remember, a Dutch biologist won an award for a paper entitled (brace yourself) ‘The first case of homosexual necrophilia in the mallard anas platyrhynchos’. I haven’t seen anything like that yet, not even in Camden. Still, that’s the Dutch for you. Always one step ahead.