Long life | 2 June 2012

I have bought myself a floating wooden duck house for my pond in Northamptonshire. It is not a fancy one, just two little back-to-back nesting boxes on a raft under a pitched roof; and it cost £270, roughly a tenth of what you would now have to pay for a duck house of the sort favoured by Sir Peter Viggers, who, until he was shamed into auctioning it for charity, had a magnificent replica of an 18th-century Swedish pavilion topped by a cupola on his pond in Hampshire. But unlike the former MP for Gosport, who got the taxpayer to foot the bill, I had to pay for my duck house myself, so I chose the cheapest I could find.

All the same, I feel a little thrill at being associated in even the smallest way with this symbol of sleaze; and I see myself, if not quite as a member of Ferdinand Mount’s ‘New Few’, at least as someone who would now be more at ease in the company of corrupt oligarchs.

Furthermore, my duck house has proved an excellent purchase. I only recently started keeping ducks, and the experience began traumatically. I have an enormous ornamental pond — about 150ft long and 60ft wide — that would have provided them with a safe refuge from foxes. But at first my ducks refused to go near it, feeling perhaps intimidated by its size, and preferred to splash about in what is hardly more than a puddle in the herb garden. This meant that each evening I had to herd them for safety into a hut in which they would lay their eggs on a bed of straw that became sodden and stinking with excrement during the night.