The Ducks are Back. Or are they?

In past years, we have welcomed our ducks, William and Kate, to The Phenelry. They seem untroubled by the dogs and the cat, and happily swim around on Loch Phenelry, and strut up and down the croquet lawn. But last year was not a good year for them. They had nine ducklings: cute as can be, following William and Kate around. But one morning the ducklings were all gone. William and Kate wandered around for the following days, as if maybe they had left the ducklings on the bus. But no. It was almost certainly the fox.

So, over the summer, I constructed them a floating duck house. Somewhere safe for them to lay their eggs and keep their ducklings safe. But where have William and Kate been? Certainly late turning up this year. And then, yesterday, ducks!

But are they William and Kate? This is by no means clear. This pair come and go. They have been crapping prodigiously on their own doorstep, on the deck of the new duck house. Yuk! Generally graceless, and not performing their duckly duties.

Polygonic

Today is a public holiday in Australia. So I have permitted myself a bit of downtime before starting work for the day.

Including doing the Polygon puzzle in The Times newspaper. It is a somewhat random and annoying puzzle. You have to find words using the letters in the diagram. The algorithm rejects words that it thinks are derivative, and such rejections sometimes seem a bit random. Even more annoying, it rejects some words that I reckon are perfectly good, like TICE. A tice, as any croquet player will know, is the first shot played in a game of croquet. Indeed, as any fule kno. The algorithm also allows a plethora of words that neither I, nor I suspect any normal Englishman, has ever seen or heard before. And so it is very difficult to get all of the words.

Ill Boris?

When Boris Johnson told us, a month or so after the Covid 19 scare got started, that he nearly died from Covid, and that it was only the NHS which had saved his life, my suspicious nose told me that it was a pile of bullshit, in the sense that he wasn’t anywhere near as ill as he said.

Now, a chap called Marcus J Ball, who identified himself as a total plonker in relation to Brexit, seems this time around to have banged Boris to rights on this one, and demonstrated that Boris was lying about this.

Personally, I do not care at all whether Boris did or did not have a piece of cake, or drink a glass of wine at the end of the day with his staff. Nor, particularly, do I care what he told the House of Commons about such matters.

This, on the other hand, does matter. By lying about his own Covid experience – pretending that he was at death’s door when in fact he had something no more serious than a bout of flu – he facilitated untold misery on the UK in terms of needless lockdowns, travel restrictions and unnecessary and dangerous vaccines which have caused a significant amount of injury and death.

Emergency! Emergency! Anything will do.

It has been brass monkeys here on the Fleurieu Peninsula for the last few days. But not just here: all around Australia there has been record-breaking cold weather. And not just in the last few days; although this has been a particularly chilly cold, snap average temperatures these days are down on what they were 10 years ago. And so it is hardly surprising that the new Premier of South Australia has declared a climate emergency.

But with a sense of high farce that once belonged only to the fiction of Evelyn Waugh, the basis of this state of emergency has been declared, not as “too cold” but as “too hot”.