As soon as the ducklings hatched, I knew we were in for an emotional roller coaster. Squashed in among the eggs in the incubator, I could see three little balls of yellow fur. They were all ridiculously charming, but one of them was clearly a bit different.
Oh boy, I said to myself. Dig deep. This is going to be tough. What do you do? What do you say? You have a tiny, sweet duckling that has survived the rigours of hatching – but clearly isn’t going to last much longer. I wasn’t sure what line to take.
I could be phlegmatic and farmer-like, and tell the kids that – hey-ho – the duckling was going to die. Or else we could invest even more emotion in the baby duck, and launch a round-the-clock battle to keep the breath in its body.
We took them out of the incubator, and as they hopped around their cage, I thought how unfair it all is. There was a stripy one called Wally, who seemed to be some sort of mallard, and who exuded confidence the minute he broke from the shell.
Then there were two little bright custard ones, probably ‘call’ ducks, the very common species that comes from Holland.
We feel for Donny the dying duckling, because we project our story on his, says Boris Johnson
Of these two ‘call’ ducklings, one was called Daffy, and was immediately able to stand up, and was drinking water and pecking at food with the same enthusiasm as the mallard.
The other was Donny. You only had to look at Donny to feel a twang on the heart strings. He had a strange acid-burn mark on his head, which looked as though it might be dried albumen from the egg, but which never went away.
He was a bit wall-eyed. His left winglet seemed to be badly fixed to his body.
He was slower to drink than the others, and he had trouble standing up, as if he were drunk. I pointed out his difficulties to Jason, our neighbour, who is the resident duck-whisperer.
Ah well, he sighed, and raised his eyebrows expressively. He has seen a lot of ducklings, has Jason.
He didn’t say it aloud, since there were joyful children in the room. But I knew exactly what he meant. Donny was not as other ducks. Donny had been put together according to a subtly different blueprint. Donny was a goner; and yet we utterly refused to accept it.
For the next few days the house was to become a kind of duckling Intensive Care Unit. The cold-blooded, dispassionate option was ruled out – possibly because we had already been traumatised by several cases of premature duck death.
Before Christmas Jason had given us five lovely little ducks, of various exotic species. The kids had walked them over the road and put them in the pond, and they seemed to flourish. I would watch them like that chap in The Sopranos, and feel my heart lift.
Then one day the duck pond froze over. I should have realised that this was a disaster. The ducks could no longer use the water for safety. Was it a cat? Was it a fox? I don’t know – but whatever it was bit the poor ducks’ heads off and left them by the side of the pond, in a massacre so grisly that I had to steer people away.
I tried to find some replacement ducks, but it didn’t seem to be the right season. Then Jason had an idea. He was starting to find duck eggs lying around. If I could find an incubator, he could give us the eggs, and we would hatch them.
So I got an incubator from Amazon and now, slightly to my amazement, we had these three enchanting hatchlings. As every new parent knows, your rejoicing is mingled with terror that something will go wrong.
My wife Carrie stayed up all night with Donny, and I mean all night. She cradled him, fed him with water and then with sugar water, and brewer’s yeast, in case he was lacking niacin. She stroked his slightly mutant head. She crooned little duck songs (I am assuming that this is what happened, since I am afraid I was asleep). By morning, she seemed to have worked a miracle. He was a lot perkier. He was much steadier on his feet, hopping and flapping around.
He was drinking and even seemed to be having a go at the food. On day three he was much the same – though he wasn’t really eating much, and his head kept nodding as though he were about to fall asleep. By day four he was clearly falling behind.
The other two were getting visibly bigger and more vigorous, while Donny just seemed dozy. If you made a noise, he would get up and move around, and do a bit of cheeping, but somehow it was as though the life force was feebler in him than in the others.
Very early the next day I came down to find that the other two were sitting around him, packed tight as though trying to keep him warm. It was no use. Donny was gone. There was great lamentation in the house.
Donny was put in a sarcophagus (a plastic Chinese takeaway tub), and it was some time before the mourners would allow me to bury him in the garden, and even then there was some anxiety about whether he would be lonely.
Why do we care so much? Is there some evolutionary reason? Perhaps there is some rational explanation for our attachment to living creatures – no matter how misshapen or eccentric.
Donny clearly suffered from some form of genetic abnormalities; but unless I have badly misremembered my biology O-level, we depend on genetic abnormalities for the very existence of the human race and all the beautiful and wonderful organisms of the earth.
In the very distant past some ancestor of Donny the duckling emerged with strange webbing between his toes or a weirdly long beak, and his mother said to herself, Oh no, how horrific; he’ll never get a girlfriend looking like that.
Little did she know that she was the unwitting mother of the future of the species, because her boy was going to be so successful that all the girls would want to mate with him, and his genes would ultimately be propagated across the planet.
Maybe Donny was the bearer of some random genetic mutation which, had he survived, could have contributed to the gene pool.
Maybe that mark on his head betokened a super-duck intelligence, the brains to evade a cat on an icy pond. Maybe that’s why we instinctively tried to protect him. Or maybe not.
I think you will agree that it’s probably simpler than that. We feel for Donny the dying duckling, because we project our story on his. He means something to everyone who has seen a loved one die before their time; he means something to every human being who has ever felt odd, or ugly, or unable to keep up; he speaks to the depths of all those who ever felt that they weren’t as cool or as fast or as self-confident as the rest of the kids.
That’s probably why our hearts ache for a lame duck like Donny, and it isn’t a bad reason.
Well done to the polling station villagers who refused to accept my copy of Prospect magazine as my voter ID!
Boris Johnson, then-London mayor, at the polling station in 2009 in North London
You remember what the lefties all said when we brought in the new laws on voter ID.
They said it was a naked attempt to discriminate against Labour voters. They said it was all a Tory plot. They said it was blatant gerrymandering. They were talking total rubbish.
There’s no reason why Labour voters should find it harder than Tory voters to produce valid photo ID, and it is very sensible to stamp out voter fraud. There has been far too much evidence of people diddling the system – especially in places like Tower Hamlets. It needs to stop.
Look at the misery in the United States, repeatedly engulfed in crises about ballot-stuffing, with accusations being hurled by both sides. We don’t have that here – because in general we trust our system.
So I want to pay a particular tribute to the three villagers who on Thursday rightly turned me away, when I appeared in the polling station with nothing to prove my identity except the sleeve of ‘Prospect’ magazine, on which my name and address had been printed.
I showed it to them, and they looked very dubious. ‘Prospect’ their faces said. ‘No one reads that round here.’ Within minutes, I was back with my driving licence and voted Tory.