Meet the ducks
It has been a long time since there has been a duck-related update on this blog, which is a shame, because there are actually rather a lot of beautiful ducks in our new house.
Some time just before Easter, Babel and I spent a Saturday morning in nearby Hinckley, picking up some DIY materials for the house. Whilst we were doing so, we took the opportunity to wander around the town, and Babel happened to spot the most beautiful yellow duck, sitting in a charity shop window. We went inside to have a closer look and ended up being unable to leave without her 
Daisy has now taken up permanent residence on the arm of one of our leather sofas, where she is always ready for a cuddle. Unlike any of the local cats which keep invading our house, Daisy neither bites nor scratches, doesn’t require feeding with unpleasant fishy substances and, best of all, never makes me sneeze!
A couple of weekends ago, Babel decided to embrace middle age and put up some shelves 
Ever since we moved in, the best part of a year ago now, our telephone and wireless router have been living on the floor of our hallway. This hasn’t caused a problem in so far as they’ve been mostly behind the door in a position where it isn’t possible to trip over them, but nevertheless it’s not an interior design look you’d want to aim for. Babel has now happily solved this problem by acquiring a nice set of corner shelves. They may have been slightly more difficult to put up that he anticipated, but now that they’re done they look very good indeed. I was particularly impressed that he went out and bought a couple of tasteful flowers, which match with the shelf colours beautifully
There was originally a bit of a gap on the shelf with the wireless router, however, and Babel suggested that we fill it with an appropriately placed duck. He’d come across a shop in town which was selling very cute ducks at a reasonable price, so we were thinking vaguely of acquiring some. In the meantime, we were so pleased with the shelves in the hallway that we decided to put some more up in the corner of our bedroom, and suddenly we had even more empty space to fill…
The upshot was that one day I came home from work to find that Babel had purchased an entire family of ducks; a set of parents with two adorable children. We spent a happy mealtime trying to generate suitable names, which actually requires more brainpower than you might imagine, because we wanted the whole family to have names on a similar theme. Eventually we hit on the idea of names in the vein of “-illy” and had soon christened the two ducklings Billy and Milly, with the mother being Tilly. Whilst I was very satisfied with these names indeed, I was struggling to think of a suitable name for Daddy duck. In the end, the best we could come up with was Willy. I was slightly concerned that this name wasn’t suitable and that people might think it was rather an odd choice for a duck, but Babel reassured me that we were unlikely to be talking about Willy in isolation, and that within the context of Billy, Milly, Tilly etc it seems liked quite a sensible name.
The initial plan had been to put one of the ducks in the aforementioned gap next to our wireless router. Once we had our family assembled, however, it seemed rather cruel to split them up, and so we determined that the most logical solution would be to acquire a further duck, being a more distant relative, who wouldn’t be lonely sitting downstairs on its own. So it was, that yesterday Babel came home with cousin Philly, who is now taking pride of place in our hallway
It turned out that the shop had meanwhile extended its offering of ducks to include some further babies. Our bedroom is now home not only to Willy and Tilly, Billy and Milly, but also to Dilly and Jilly
Tags: Ducks