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.