Exciting news – but poignant and sad – my Ménage à trois in the bathroom has been successfully brought to a conclusion – but sadly all of the magic – as well as the spider and much of the conversation – has gone.

This sounds a bit like a Burgessian introduction to a blog – so to explain.. I have always been bad in the bath. By which I mean I can’t stay in them for longer than a few minutes – which means my expensive organic muscle repairing whatnots are largely wasted. This is a shame, because my bath has jets and foam and all of those things. Plus music.

Recently – by which I mean months – the tedium – and hence the length of the bath – has been reduced/increased by the participation of a very large spider and a plastic duck, the former voluntary and the latter not so much.

I say voluntary – the truth is that the spider likes being in the hole where one of the jets is, so every time I have a bath I carefully wash him ( or her ) out, rescue it with tissue – and place the tired thing on a shelf to recover. This has been going on for weeks. For some unknown reason it will always slide back into the bath after a few hours ( I assume – I have never seen this happen ) and be ready to repeat the exhausting journey the next day.

The fascination for me has been that out of the corner of my eye I have increasingly been convinced that the duck is happy to be put in the water – it smiles – which of course is completely silly. I never really paid this much attention – just a peripheral vision trigger, sub conscious response kind of thing – but I have been gradually talking to it – like “Yay – there you go”… bob bob smile smile … “Too much foam? Jets on or off do you think?”

I did the other day have an extended conversation, asking it whether it was happy because it could see the spider and therefore felt less likely to be grabbed, although to the best of my knowledge spiders don’t hunt ducks and this spider I absolutely know is as even worse swimmer than I am..

So my point is that today I felt that this strange triangle of relationships needed resolving. The spider was easy – I carefully took it outside and installed it in a crevice in a garden wall. I will regularly check for updates. The duck, however required a more painstaking analysis.

And this is what I found.

The duck smiles when you put it in the water because it goes from eye level – on the shelf – to below eye level – in the water. And their beaks are cunningly designed so that when seen straight on they look a bit lost- but from slightly above they are quite obviously thrilled with life.

Here :

 It’s the same duck [ Borges would love me ]

So what I desperately want to know is – did the toy companies plan all of this?

[Except the spider – obviously ]