Personal Blogs

As regular readers of my waffle will know, I am, despite all the moaning, a man of simple pleasures and very easily pleased. Give me sunshine, an MP3 player loaded with my favourite choons and a body of water to walk or cycle around or alongside and I’m generally as happy as a pig in poo. Sprinkle that body of water with the occasional duk-duk or a pair of elegant and stately swans and my happiness soars from regular levels of pig-in-poo-ness to pig-in-poo-with-a-bucket-of-toffee-apples-for-breakfast, which, if you’ve ever seen a pooey pig with a bucket of toffee-apples, you will know is just about as happy as it’s possible to get without the aid of chemicals. Probably. (In fairness, I’ve never seen a pig with a toffee apple – but it sounds about right, doesn’t it?)

This week has been notable for a couple of relatively sunny afternoons, which, given the generally appalling April/May we’ve had to this point in my neck of the Kentish woods, has made my daily circuit to the shops and back far more pleasant, and I was chuffed to find on Tuesday that I have been doubly blessed with the arrival of some new ducklings on the local pond.  Now ducklings, it cannot be denied, are one of nature’s cutest concoctions, especially the little banana and chocolate coloured ones that Mallardy Laydees tend to produce, and the sight of these teeny little pom-poms of fluff chiffing and stumbling along at the water’s edge and bobbing up and down in the shallows has helped put a silly smile on my big, gormless face for a few minutes each day since their arrival. Ahhhhhh.

But of course, just as every rose has thorns and every cherry a stone there is always a dark side, and when it comes to inland bodies of water and the creatures living around them this takes the form of the hissing, spitting, shitting machines we’ve all come to know and hate as Canadian geese. And, yes, those malevolent brooding bastards are back again this year too...

Now goslings, unlike ducklings, are seriously cute for only around 3-4 hours at most. They retain a small degree of cuteness for a couple of days or so, but this is more, I think, because of their size in comparison to their hateful parents and minor levels of residual fluffiness rather than to any actual cuteness per se. Their waddling, rather than being shambolic and comical, is just ungainly and ridiculous, and their bodies, rather than retaining the shape and texture of little pom-poms, quickly morph into ugly oval oblongs that resemble a cheap pair of novelty slippers you might receive as an unwelcome Christmas gift from a particularly stingy and tasteless maiden aunt. In essence, they are horrible, and I’m pretty sure, had he observed the wildfowl on his local lake a bit more carefully, Hans Christian Anderson would have realised, when penning his ‘Tale of the Ugly Duckling’, that he was confusing ‘Duckling’ with ‘Gosling’ and making false assumptions about the origins of the Very Fine Swan Indeed who appeared in the vicinity a month or so later. Sorry, geese, but I’m with the chorus on this one: Quack – get out, Quack Quack – get out, Quack Quack – get out of town. And don’t come back. Ever.

IN OTHER NEWS: Last weekend Ben went off for a ‘back to basics’ camping weekend with the scouts. On the plus side, we got a beautiful afternoon’s walk along the coastal path between Whitstable and Herne Bay (one of my favourite stretches of coastline thanks to the garjuss beach huts and sea view from the heights of Tankerton) before I dropped him off, but these few hours of brilliant sunshine (I actually ‘caught the sun’ :-o) couldn’t really make up for what came after, which was pretty much non-stop rain. When I arrived to collect him on Sunday afternoon he emerged from the trees looking like ‘Swamp Thing’, plastered in mud from head to foot and shivering like a shaved polar bear. ‘Have you had a good time, son?’ I asked, stepping forward to help him free his hiking boots from the clay into which he was slowly sinking.

He grunted a reply which I took to mean ‘no’ then pointed toward a small hut in the distance. ‘Kit... In... There...’ he managed to say before collapsing into my outstretched arms. I threw him over my shoulder in the manner of a fireman, then slowly folded to the ground in the manner of a weakling as my knees buckled and my spinal column crumbled into dust. Did I mention he’s six-foot-two already, at fourteen? Oh. Well he is. And ‘chunky’ with it.

Anyhoo, cutting a long story short he had managed to lose two pairs of jeans, a jumper, and his Explorers uniform, and his sleeping roll, blanket and sleeping bag were three shapeless blobs of stinking clay and twigs that needed half a dozen of us to individually manhandle into the boot of the car. I think my shocks have had it from the journey home. I’ve just about managed to salvage them all, thanks to the sunny weather on Monday which gave me the opportunity to lay them out on his trampoline to dry before chipping away at the clay with a hammer and bolster. What’s that old quote about sculpting - ‘I chip away at the stone to find the angel within’ or whatever? Well like that, only think ‘sleeping bag’ or ‘bed roll’ rather than angel. After getting off the worst I gave them a good soak in the bath. I just, with the aid of a sink plunger and wire coat hanger, managed to beat back the golem left behind when I pulled the plug, but it was a close thing.

Oh well, onward and upward. He’s got his Duke of Edinburgh award coming up soon. Let’s hope the weather stays nice for it.