venta

On Saturday I bought two loaves of bread, expecting to be making sandwiches for a large number of people. In the end, the number of people was slightly smaller and the required quantity of sandwiches smaller still (we'd eaten too much cake), and I had a lot of bread left.

Accordingly, when we set off on a jaunt on Sunday, I tucked a bag of crusts into my pocket. You see, it's a well known fact that wherever you go, there will be ducks. And, despite years of living with Frances, I still regard ducks as cuddly, benign creatures who deserve a crust now and again. However, wherever you go, and there are ducks you will not have any bread. There will be disappointed downturning of beaks, and you'll wish you'd been better prepared.

Accordingly, I took bread.

Sometime later, standing admiring the views of several counties, I was asked exactly how many ducks I had expected to find on the top of White Horse Hill, anyway. (For non-Oxford readers, that's a large and excessively windswept hilltop populated entirely by faintly pissed-off sheep and one extremely ancient chalk figure of a horse.)

Well, you know, not that many. And maybe binoculars would have been a better thing to bring. But, er, maybe we were going to travel home via some ducks. I was navigating, so we were damn well going to.

After perusing the horse, and the funny shaped Dragon Hill, and walking an accidentally long way round the oddly-sided valley, we trotted off to visit the Blowing Stone in Kingston Lisle. Incidentally, if anyone knows how to get a note out of it, do let me know. I was a dismal failure.

The pub (also called the Blowing Stone) whose car park we'd temporarily borrowed turned out to be shut. However, my handy tourist map of the Cotswolds showed a nice pub not far away. It was called the Trout, was in a village called Tadpole Bridge, and was marked on the map as slap up against the Thames. Ideal duck territory.

Except it was one of those stupid, deep, bankless bits of the Thames, better for fish and narrowboats and completely duck-free. The Trout was also shut. Instead we detoured home via The Lamb in Buckland. Which was also shut.

We called into Kingston Bagpuss as we passed it, too, because it's got a silly name. It turns out, however, that Kingston Bagpuss doesn't actually exist. And its pub was shut.

Yesterday when I walked into town, I pocketed my bread again. My walk back down the towpath (with ducks) was scuppered by the indigenous monsoon we seem to have at the moment.

This evening, my dance team was scaring locals again; one pub we went to was right on a river. The river had a nice, low, grassy bank on which was scattered sundry duck and swan feathers. There was not one single sodding webfooted being in sight. I am starting to get the feeling that the waterfowl of Oxfordshire are mocking me.

Tomorrow, I am going to take my bag of crusts to work. At lunchtime, come rain or shine, I shall slither out the back of the business park to the Kennet and Avon canal. I shall feed the birds there if I personally have to ram the stuff down their ungrateful feathery gizzards.

_{Yes thanks, I do know the correct plural of duck. I just don't like it.}