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. For ducks, while apparently obsessed with personal hygiene (since they are forever washing and preening themselves), are in reality as disgusting in their habits as any bird could be.
Then one day a man arrived in a van to take away an old refrigerator and asked if he could let his terrier out for a run; and within 30 seconds of its release, this wretched dog had bitten off the head of a khaki Campbell and sent the rest of the ducks squawking in terror down to the big pond, from which they have never returned. But the problem then was that I couldn’t collect their eggs, which they laid on mud islands in the middle of the pond to be left at the mercy of avian predators. So, following the example of Sir Peter, who I believe was once my contemporary at Trinity Hall, Cambridge, I bought a floating duck house on the internet and launched it upon my enormous pond. But first I tied it to the side of the pond with a long cord so that I could pull it to shore and collect the eggs that the ducks dutifully proceeded to lay in it.
Sir Peter may have overreached himself with his pretentious ‘Stockholm’ duck house, but I can now completely understand why he wanted something of the kind. For my duck house has transformed my life. No longer do I face the grim task of shutting the ducks in every night against their will; no longer do I have to clear up their revolting mess in the morning; no longer do I have to live in constant fear for their safety. But I can still collect their eggs; and if I have recently stopped doing so, it’s only because two ducks — a tiny call duck and a large khaki Campbell — have decided to sit side by side on their separate clutches. So instead of collecting the eggs, I go down to the pond each day to see if any have hatched out. So far none has done so, but I live in hope. And a strange thing is that the ducks seem to keep their new house remarkably clean.
I now have eight ducks altogether — two call ducks, two khaki Campbells, two chocolate Indian runner ducks, and two Silver Appleyards (which slightly resemble dodos); and they give me nothing but pleasure. They don’t have personalities in the way that, say, dogs do, but they are like the characters in a Walt Disney cartoon, constantly engaged in stylised comic routines. I could watch them for hours. And now, thanks to my floating duck house, I can do so without having to experience their more unattractive side.
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