Outside the Box

Do you know what they don't have here? Chipmunks and humming birds. That's right, no chipmunk stew or humming bird pie. Do you know what they do have here? Ducks. Thousands of the buggers. And do you know why? Because it's so dry.

I know this seems backward, but you have to remember this is England where contradictions abound and thinking outside the box is mandatory. If you don’t have such abilities, watching news stories about how bad the drought is and how rain will only make it worse might cause your head to explode, like mine almost did when I heard the newsreader make this pronouncement with a straight face. The reasoning goes like this:

The southern half of England is made up of clay and flint. (The northern half is made up of people wearing tweed and flat caps, but that's for another article.) This is a testimony to the hardy people who dwelt here for generations, coaxing a living out of the thin, rocky soil, waiting for the day when they could sell the land off to developers and become investment bankers or SUV salesmen.

Clay has some wonderful properties, if you're a potter. Outside of that arena, however, it’s not so attractive; you can't grow much in it, when wet, it sucks you down with its mucky, sloppy French-kiss and refuses to give up your wellies no matter how hard you tug at them and, when dry, it becomes hard as concrete. And it shifts.

By now you're figuring out what sort of havoc shifting concrete can visit upon underground pipes laid down before the Reformation. The water infrastructure, the perky news reporter just claimed, is experiencing about four or five major bursts per week. But if it rains, the suddenly swelling soil will cause even more damage, only then they won't be able to see were the leaks are until the water all runs off of the hardpan and we find ourselves just a thirsty as we were before the rain, only with more gushing pipes and dwindling reservoirs.

Which brings me back to the ducks.

In the same gloom and doom news programme, we were warned that the weather, coupled with our kindness, was destroying the delicate balance of nature. (All news in Britain is doom and gloom, so this wasn't really unusual; I refer to our Sunday paper as the 'How Are We Going To Die This Week Gazette.') If we want to avoid certain and horrible death, we must stop feeding the ducks.

"It's so much fun, and the kids really enjoy it," protested a wholesome, British couple. But the relaxing afternoon spent by the pond with a bag of stale bread is under threat. The shrinking lakes, which could comfortably support dozens of ducks, are instead crammed with hundreds. They are polluting the water, killing the fish and generally mucking the place up, and until people stop feeding them they are never going to become hungry enough to fly off to Scotland where there is lots of water, even if there are fewer people willing to part with stale bread.

The people down here are willing to part with stale bread quickly enough it seems, probably because it's so hot and dry you can't keep it fresh for very long so you might as well feed it to the ducks. See how the drought cycle feeds on itself, and how we're all spiraling downward into a Serengeti sand trap? Soon we'll all be in rags, foraging through the sagebrush for food and conducting tribal warfare over the last active water main breaks. (Go on, laugh, but this will probably be the lead story in The Daily Mail on Sunday.)

But I don't think it will come to that, because I have a plan. You can't stop families from enjoying a day out with the ducks; it's just human nature. What you need to do is take away their stale bread and give them pellet pistols instead. It’s a win-win situation: it will liven up the afternoon immeasurably, give the kids memories to look back on for years to come, solve the duck problem and decide the issue of Sunday dinner all in one stroke. (If you can't have chipmunk stew, you might as well eat duck.)

When I told me wife the plan, she professed to not recalling why she married me. But she can't fool me; I know she's fatally attracted to me because of my uncanny ability to think outside the box.