Why I love ducks!

The duck has been getting a bad press lately, especially when the media uncovered a number of them living in Westminster-subsidised housing. Indeed, our ire has been such that we are in danger of throwing away the meat with the left-over sauce. After all, the duck has contributed to so many arenas of life, from the arts to the dinner table, that it deserves a sound-out now and again.
Throughout the ages, the duck has inspired creativity, from those wonderful dog-and-duck public house signboards, to the flocks of flying ornaments that grace the walls of household halls up and down the country, to the Marx Brothers movie of 1933, Duck Soup. The duck has contributed to the English language with words like ‘duckboard’ and ‘duckweed’. The duck has provided a word that means a female bird, a way of avoiding things, a type of cloth, and an indispensable bathroom-furniture cleaning thingummy.
So let’s not begrudge our feathered friend his subsidised home. After all, the taxpayer provides housing for humans. Instead, on this fine spring day, let’s sound for this web-footed wonder, one great, resounding quack….