As so often, Hello! magazine had the scoop. Carrie and Boris Johnson are expecting again. This time it is ducks. For her 36th birthday Mrs Johnson was presented with an incubator and some duck eggs. Any day now there will be a splintering of shell and a chorus of incipient, high-pitched quacks as another waddling brood fights its way into the world. Yet more young beaks for Boris to feed, and all the little darlings topped by fluffy, yellow fur. Those Johnson genes!
There is another sense in which baby ducks resemble MPs: they do not always last terribly long
Duck incubators are fashionable in Chelsea-tractor circles. You need enough room near the Aga to accommodate a cage where the new arrivals can be kept warm and safe from clumsy-oaf feet. Space is not a problem for the Johnsons now that they own a ‘sprawling’ (Hello! speak) country house. ‘Impressive, lovely, £3.8 million, 400-year-old Brightwell Manor,’ in Brightwell-cum-Sotwell, Oxon, has its own duck pond, soon to be a splashing kindergarten, more precisely Entegarten, as the Johnson ducklings take to water.
Friends of ours in Herefordshire have ducks. Every evening they file back into the duck house like US marines returning from field manoeuvres. Young children love ducklings. They are more fun than the plastic, bath-time variety. Live ducklings have a busy, slightly drunken gait and occasionally tumble on to their backs. When this happens they flap their feet in the air and have difficulty righting themselves. A prod from a human finger will help them roll back on to their fronts and continue cheerfully on their way. Ducklings are careless, comical, eat a lot and make a frightful mess. Just like certain politicians. Is it this, or a fertility obsession, or a Tony Soprano-esque hankering for innocence that attracted Boris and Carrie to ducks?
There is another sense in which baby ducks resemble MPs: they do not always last terribly long. My wife and I live in an old mill. A brook flows past – sometimes through – our house and every spring we are visited by ducks. Normally it is a couple but this year it is a ménage à trois, two drakes and one female. The chaps have handsome green heads. Their girlfriend is outwardly a more drab prospect, though no doubt she has what Hello! magazine would call a bubbly personality.
Every year, as happens, they produce little ones. The mother-duck puffs out her chest and proudly paddles along the brook, followed by some ten ducklings who swim in a neat line. It is the quaintest thing. Naming the little dears is probably, mind you, a mistake, for heartache will always follow. Next time you look at the brook the ten ducklings have become nine, then eight, soon four, eventually fewer. As the limerick goes:
A foul-smelling vulture said ‘cluck!’
Translation: ‘I’m down on me luck.
Can you show me a bird bath?
I’m now on my third path
And my talons still stink of dead duck.’
It is a lesson we must all learn, though three-year-old Wilfred Johnson, his sister Romy, two, and baby brother Frank may have hoped to postpone it for perhaps a few years yet: this world is ruthless. Your average duckling is, to a Brightwell-cum-Sotwell owl, an amuse bouche, an hors d’oeuvre, the owl equivalent, give or take hoisin sauce, of first-class rillette. Even before you consider the local shoot, magpies are not averse to duckling. Mink, squirrels, foxes and domestic moggies have also been known to indulge. Duckling can be jolly moreish. As someone once said, them’s the breaks.
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