Walked past mad duck lady pond again today and there was a mummy duck (M’lady) laying out in the sun with two medium- size ducklings (you, know, about ‘serves one as a main course’ size rather than ‘serves 2-3’ or ‘serves 1 as a starter’). As I got along side of them they made off for the water, and I noticed just too late that one of them was having a bit of a struggle. Made a grab for it, but it slipped into the water just ahead of my grasping fingers and made off across the pond, trailing the length of fishing line wrapped around its legs behind it .
Hung about for a bit in the hope they’d come ashore again, but they were having none of it. In the end I went and knocked on the mad duck lady’s door. She knew instantly the family I was talking about (the other ducklings are younger and there are three + mum to that group) and I was reassured that the line round the leg was a new development and therefore less likely to result in an Hamputation. (Here, how come one legged ducks/swans/geese etc don’t just go round and round in circles like Ben in a pedallo? Their feet must work as rudders too; either that or they can ‘lean in’ to change direction like motorcyclists do.)
Duck lady knows a man from the RSPCA with a net, so she will give him a shout and Dinky will be line free (I almost said ‘tackle free’ then realised that might sound like he was going to be neutered) before you can say Jack Robinson. Or ‘Quack’.
As I was typing that I remembered that the first video I ever bought for Ben was an old cartoon series called ‘Dinky the Duck’ (hence my naming the duckling above ‘Dinky’, you see). His mater (Ben's, not D the D's) and I had gone to Blockbuster™ to rent a movie shortly after he’d shown up as a little blue line on a pee-stick, and we saw D the D on the top of a bargain bin for about a quid. We thought it quite apt, as her pet name for me was ‘bird’ (can’t remember why) and he would be my little chick or duckling. So we took it home and watched it and while it was mostly crap we rolled up because there was a chicken in one episode that squawked indignantly and the squawk sounded just like ‘F’koff’ F’koff’.
Ben used to watch it quite a bit when he was a toddler (he used to get all flappy at one episode where Dinky was being roasted over a spit by a wolf then shout ‘Yay’ when Dinky got away). It was hard keeping a straight face when the Sweary Mary of a chook was on, but I don’t think Ben ever noticed...
Anyhooo... I saw something on Twitter or some such the other day where someone said ‘you can tell a lot about a person in 140 characters’, and that got me thinking about that other statistic that says we make lasting judgements about people based on our initial meeting with them and the first two minutes of conversation or whatever. Now that, I think, could actually be the ultimate flaw in human nature, because we take at face value the behaviours of someone being anything but what they actually are. I mean, ask most ladies whether their life partner of choice had his hand down his pants playing with his knackers the first time they met or whether he farted and said ‘get out and walk, Donald’ and it’s rare as rocking horse shit to hear the answer ‘yes’. A year down the road, though, and chances are this is pretty much a nightly routine performed while lying on the sofa hogging the TV remote. Likewise, if you ask most blokes if they realised their partners were mental when they first met them you’ll get a similarly negative response.
I think I read somewhere that the initial chemical rush of falling in love lasts for about six months, and it’s only after that that the real ‘bonding’ starts to occur. Horrifyingly, that first six months is also one of the key periods when someone is most likely to commit adultery, purely and simply because all those chemicals are flying around and, as the old song goes, ‘resistance is low’. Nasty piece of work, Mother Nature, ent she?
Don’t get me wrong, I’m not espousing the idea that we should always wait six months before coming to any conclusions about the people we meet – that would be just silly. I mean, if someone smells of piss and is waving a bit of four by two in your face and shouting ‘come on then, do you want some, do you’ it’s probably safe to assume that you wouldn’t get to like them much however much time you spent with them. But I do think we ought to be a little bit more forgiving and less judgemental than our natural psychology allows for, because, let’s face it, just how reliable do first impressions turn out to be when time and hindsight offer a better vantage point for making an assessment? It takes allsorts to make a liquorice, and if we insist on making snap judgements that we only like the round ones with little blue balls on who knows what lovely alternatives we could be missing out on?
Don’t go too mad, though, or you’ll end up with the squitts!
Awwwwww... poooor ikkle duk-duk...
Walked past mad duck lady pond again today and there was a mummy duck (M’lady) laying out in the sun with two medium- size ducklings (you, know, about ‘serves one as a main course’ size rather than ‘serves 2-3’ or ‘serves 1 as a starter’). As I got along side of them they made off for the water, and I noticed just too late that one of them was having a bit of a struggle. Made a grab for it, but it slipped into the water just ahead of my grasping fingers and made off across the pond, trailing the length of fishing line wrapped around its legs behind it
.
Hung about for a bit in the hope they’d come ashore again, but they were having none of it. In the end I went and knocked on the mad duck lady’s door. She knew instantly the family I was talking about (the other ducklings are younger and there are three + mum to that group) and I was reassured that the line round the leg was a new development and therefore less likely to result in an Hamputation. (Here, how come one legged ducks/swans/geese etc don’t just go round and round in circles like Ben in a pedallo? Their feet must work as rudders too; either that or they can ‘lean in’ to change direction like motorcyclists do.)
Duck lady knows a man from the RSPCA with a net, so she will give him a shout and Dinky will be line free (I almost said ‘tackle free’ then realised that might sound like he was going to be neutered) before you can say Jack Robinson. Or ‘Quack’.
As I was typing that I remembered that the first video I ever bought for Ben was an old cartoon series called ‘Dinky the Duck’ (hence my naming the duckling above ‘Dinky’, you see). His mater (Ben's, not D the D's) and I had gone to Blockbuster™ to rent a movie shortly after he’d shown up as a little blue line on a pee-stick, and we saw D the D on the top of a bargain bin for about a quid. We thought it quite apt, as her pet name for me was ‘bird’ (can’t remember why) and he would be my little chick or duckling. So we took it home and watched it and while it was mostly crap we rolled up because there was a chicken in one episode that squawked indignantly and the squawk sounded just like ‘F’koff’ F’koff’.
Ben used to watch it quite a bit when he was a toddler (he used to get all flappy at one episode where Dinky was being roasted over a spit by a wolf then shout ‘Yay’ when Dinky got away). It was hard keeping a straight face when the Sweary Mary of a chook was on, but I don’t think Ben ever noticed...
Anyhooo... I saw something on Twitter or some such the other day where someone said ‘you can tell a lot about a person in 140 characters’, and that got me thinking about that other statistic that says we make lasting judgements about people based on our initial meeting with them and the first two minutes of conversation or whatever. Now that, I think, could actually be the ultimate flaw in human nature, because we take at face value the behaviours of someone being anything but what they actually are. I mean, ask most ladies whether their life partner of choice had his hand down his pants playing with his knackers the first time they met or whether he farted and said ‘get out and walk, Donald’ and it’s rare as rocking horse shit to hear the answer ‘yes’. A year down the road, though, and chances are this is pretty much a nightly routine performed while lying on the sofa hogging the TV remote. Likewise, if you ask most blokes if they realised their partners were mental when they first met them you’ll get a similarly negative response.
I think I read somewhere that the initial chemical rush of falling in love lasts for about six months, and it’s only after that that the real ‘bonding’ starts to occur. Horrifyingly, that first six months is also one of the key periods when someone is most likely to commit adultery, purely and simply because all those chemicals are flying around and, as the old song goes, ‘resistance is low’. Nasty piece of work, Mother Nature, ent she?
Don’t get me wrong, I’m not espousing the idea that we should always wait six months before coming to any conclusions about the people we meet – that would be just silly. I mean, if someone smells of piss and is waving a bit of four by two in your face and shouting ‘come on then, do you want some, do you’ it’s probably safe to assume that you wouldn’t get to like them much however much time you spent with them. But I do think we ought to be a little bit more forgiving and less judgemental than our natural psychology allows for, because, let’s face it, just how reliable do first impressions turn out to be when time and hindsight offer a better vantage point for making an assessment? It takes allsorts to make a liquorice, and if we insist on making snap judgements that we only like the round ones with little blue balls on who knows what lovely alternatives we could be missing out on?
Don’t go too mad, though, or you’ll end up with the squitts!
:D