Hello Ducky!

Paint me blue and call me Susan – but for twenty-eight minutes this week it looked like Spring might be on the horizon!

The doll trees are always the first to bud

Do you remember when the seasons were essentially all the same length? Three months, give or take? You knew where you were. You knew whether it was time for snow shoes or flip-flops. You knew whether you’d likely need a vest. Winter was vest weather. While summer…was also vest weather. I’ve never appreciated how excellent the vest marketeers were – an item of clothing for the whole year round. Clever.

But as we approach the end of March, I’m fairly sure winter is approaching the end of its fifth month. Those of you ‘down south’ might think this an over-exaggeration, but Southerners are a funny breed (I was one for twenty years, I know of what I speak) they are like the foursome in The Wizard of Oz, before they pull back the curtain and realise everything they assumed is wrong and Southerny.

Consider me your Wizard. And consider yourselves told. A three month winter is a thing of the past. Like the dodo. Or a friendly exchange on Twitter. Or thinking you’ll ever leap out of bed again, with wild abandon, rather than with terrifying trepidation about which bit of you will twang or cease to remember what it was inserted into your skeleton for.

But enough about my morning routine.

No matter how long the seasons now are, it cannot be denied that change is, nearly, upon us. I’ve seen many signs that the frosty times are ending – the buds are shrugging off their winter coats and emerging in something slinky and green; the robins are getting tough, letting us all know they’re feeling romantic; and I saw a neighbour’s cat run across the road with a huge rat in her mouth – and as she went in through her cat flap, I thought how her owner’s going to love it - there’s nothing more Springy than a partially chewed rodent!

But most of all, it’s the ducks.

Sarah and I went for a wander by the streams and canal we are geographically blessed with, and the ducks were most definitely pre-jiggy.

(It’s a purely Attenborough-esque term, not my own.)

Hello Ducky!

Mallards.

Only mallards.

Why do we have so many more mallards than any other sort of duck? Could you ask your friends and let me know? Do other ducks not feel romantic as often as the horny mallard? Or are there simply more mallard ducklings every year, leading to more pre-jigginess in the mallard department? Actually, don’t waste your time asking your friends. No one knows. Not even mallards.

We watched a lady mallard…

I’m just going to interrupt myself here. What is it about the lady mallard? Can’t she see all the green-headed effort her beau’s gone to? He looks fabulous. But there she is. Brown. I’ve got nothing against brown, per se. I like Autumn. But it’s like she knows she’s pulled and isn’t making the same level of effort.

Most birds are like that. And lots of mammals too. Including humans!

Er, wait, no, hang on, that's not even remotely true, is it?

When I see a teenage couple up here, he’s wearing jogging bottoms and a t-shirt (all year round, we make ‘em tough in the North) – essentially clothes to play an X-Box in.

The young lady - probably a Polly Shelby, from Peaky Blinders, in waiting, mind you… (Other crime families are available), well she looks like she’s on the way to a wedding! She’s in her best togs, all Instagram filter-faced and eye-lashes so long, you could clean down the back of a radiator with them. And it doesn’t seem to bother her she’s out with a couch potato.

So too, a lady mallard. No, a gentleman mallard. Actually, compared to teenagers up here, the mallard has a trick or two not yet suggested as a social media essential – a green head, for one.

You know, if on Insta, the Kardashians began painting their heads green, how long do you suppose it would be until it became de rigueur for young people to begin ‘mallarding’? It would no doubt replace dogging as the most likely activity to be undertaken in the middle of nowhere – people getting together and quacking at each other!

Dedicated followers of fashion

Which brings me right back to the Mrs. Mallard that Sarah and I spotted during our walk.

Well, not so much spotted, as heard going QUACK! QUACK! QUACK! Varied conversation is not top of a lady mallard’s courting ritual. She just kept at it as we watched.

Then we realised she was quacking orders at her green-headed fella. There was another mallard couple a little further up the river, and our Mrs. M was losing her shit! I don’t know how much river bank a ducky couple need – the second couple seemed to be OK with an area under some riverside bushes. But this one wanted the whole bloody river!

I could sense it was under sufferance, yet off Mr. Green Head went, racing towards the second couple. He didn’t make an aggressive sound, but it was his eyes though – you could see he was apologising to couple number two. He didn’t want to chase them like this, but what could he do? Her Outdoors wanted them gone and he, frankly, wanted to get his wing over and bugger off till next year, I’ve no doubt! And who can blame him?

Do ducks ever, seasons after they’ve romanced, mated, parented and gone their separate ways, ever see each other, swim a little faster along a current of nostalgia, only to realise the duck in their sights is a stranger? I can see how that might be a thing. I don’t want to be accused of being ‘duckist’ but to my mind, within the sexes of mallards – I think they all look pretty much the same.

Maybe ducks think we humans all look the same? Apart from the eyelash and ‘filler’  brigade, they don’t look like anything a duck has ever seen before.

I once saw a young woman on a train…

Hang on, that’s not the end of my story.

She was wearing something on her skin (bronzer, apparently) that had smoothed out every single feature of her face, (except her nose and eyes, without those, she’d have been a satsuma). I couldn’t quite fathom what I was seeing. She looked like she’d used a smart phone filter on her actual head. I kept looking at her surreptitiously because I couldn’t quite work out whether she was still human.

As anyone who knows me well, will be aware, I am a bastion of fashion in all its incarnations. When flares were in, I didn’t care, I wore what I liked. When they were replaced by boot cut, I didn’t care, I wore what I liked. Then when ‘skinny’ was the only way to go, I didn’t care myself, but I did worry about the sperm count in the younger generation, because, well, too tight is, apparently a sperm-count thing – remember Kevin Bacon in that film, She’s Having a Baby?

Exactly.

Remember when men started wearing super-skinny trousers? With leather shoes? And no socks?! I wrote to the Olympic committee asking if hunting such British men, with packs of angry ducks, could be an event in a future games. Their utter silence suggested a firm ‘no’ to my sock-ed suggestion. I couldn’t believe it, and the Olympics are supposed to be all-inclusive?

Apparently NOT an Olympic sport!

I have never been a follower of fashion. I have always been a wearer of stuff I like. Although I am probably best described as a man who still wears things he doesn’t like because they have not yet fallen apart. When I put clean socks on and see they have developed holes, I don’t immediately bin them – not least because I have already committed to wearing them today, and secondly, can I really be arsed? If I remember, they are thrown away that night. If I don’t remember, they are washed and the above struggle continues another day.

Fashion for fashion’s sake has never made any sense to me. If it became ‘fashionable’ to punch one’s self in the face every time anyone said ‘cock’, I would spend the rest of my life releasing male chickens into public spaces. I truly would. And I would feel it a life well lived.

Cock!

I realise that beauty is in the eye of the beholder – but why is there an arachnid in the eye of everyone who thinks Instagram knows what fashionable beauty is? Don’t get me wrong, I have nothing against an individual’s right to wear fake eye-lashes. Not at all. But ‘fashion’ makes me think, that to some people, it’s simply an oppression that they must kow-tow to in order not to be pilloried.

That’s not fashion – that’s a dystopian future.

And if you discover a fake eyelash or two – as a rule I understand it’s usually two – makes your face look fabulous, well, great, knock yourself out. Cock!

(Just to be clear, this is not an insult, it’s a call-back to a comment made a couple of paragraphs ago, my legal team thought it best to include this disclaimer. Cocks!

That one, however, is an insult – my legal team are idiots.)

But if you don’t like fake eyelashes, or extensions, or whatever, or just don’t care, that’s great too. They are not magic, they do not signify ‘beauty’ they are just a thing that someone else demanded we wear. Not me, obviously – although I may have had to wear them playing Ugly Sister in a pantomime at University, I can’t quite remember – but if I did, I guarantee they did nothing whatsoever to enhance my appearance.

Anyway, whatever one’s stance, one day, as we push our eyelash supporting wheel-barrows down the high street, our phone will ping, an individual devoid of all facial hair, will announce that what was fashionable this morning while we wolfed down our Frosties, is now a thing of the past and we must throw our lashes into the gutter, shave our heads and join the queue outside our local decorating shop, praying they’ve not yet run out of cans of Mallard Green paint.

Then, no doubt, the socials will be full of vicious Harpies screaming that our Mallard Green is actually ‘Turtle’, or ‘Broccoli’ green. You mark my words.

Who knew 'green' was so complicated?

But Mr. & Mrs Ducky are not bothered about such things. As Spring approaches they get a trembling in their nethers and suddenly a nest, a solitary area and a partner must be found. Mostly for shouting at. Then, a few weeks later it’s all eggs, ducklings and cute photos for a brief time before returning to a life of trying not to eat human-given bread, because someone somewhere revealed it wasn’t good for them.

Blimey, it’s not easy being a duck, is it?

Or a human.

It is, however, easier to be a slightly warmer human, and so the almost-arrival of the new season, gets a huge thumbs up from me.

Although I've just seen Scotland is expecting snow. And it’s raining.

Maybe I’ll keep the thermals out for another week or so.

Happy Easter, everyone!