The duck-rabbit found itself beginning to sweat and seethe with misanthropy mere minutes after arriving in the Cafetorium for back-to-school night. It was about mid-way through the parade of perky women with bouncy hair explaining why Carnival! or RunFest! Or Science Club! was super-fun! that I started to feel my will to live slipping away. It’s not that the duck-rabbit hates running or science (although I do despise the annual school Carnival with a pure and flinty hatred). The duck-rabbit likes running. The duck-rabbit likes science. But, curiously, when these activities the duck-rabbit actually enjoys are described as “super-fun” ways of becoming a part of the school “family” all the joy just drains out of them. The duck-rabbit is not good at having fun in groups of strangers. The duck-rabbit feels an urge to start backing away slowly.

Perhaps you’re tsk-tsking at the duck-rabbit. Perhaps you’re thinking, “who is against the science club, for Pete’s sake?” Well, hear me out. There was just something about the moment when the (perky, bouncy-haired) Chair of the Science Club, who has run this club for a few years now, announced blithely to the assembled parents, “I know nothing about science! That’s why I love running this club!” that made the duck-rabbit let out an involuntary snort. What the nice lady meant was that she wanted to run the club so that she’d have the opportunity to learn about science along with her daughter, and that’s really great, really it is, except for when you’re trapped in the Cafetorium for one of these allegedly scientifically educational events, as the duck-rabbit was last year, and you start thinking to yourself, “I think this event may have been organized by someone who knows fuck-all about science.”

The duck-rabbit was acutely aware that it might see or perhaps even, gods willing, meet the lovely Sophisticate on this evening. And the duck-rabbit felt conscious that it was not attired in vestments worthy of that belle of the Schoolyard. No, the duck-rabbit was dressed in what I will generously call its “summer wardrobe.” At this juncture, I want all of you who have seen the duck-rabbit at any time in the past two months to conjure it up in your mind’s eye because, odds are, I was wearing precisely this ensemble when I saw you, rendering any description unnecessary. You see, I’ve been wearing this same combination of clothing, ooh, probably 3-5 days a week since July.

For the benefit of those who haven’t seen the duck-rabbit lately, will you local friends all help me describe the outfit? Great, thanks. Yup, Em, you’re right, it’s my trusty Old Navy blue-and-white striped T-shirt (I’ve got 3 of ‘em!). Then, yes Laura, it’s the A-line black-linen skirt with the drawstring waist and, you’re so right, the skirt you’re making me (what a lucky duck-rabbit I am!) will be so much more stylish than this old piece of sackcloth (in fact, now I think of it, that’s probably why you’re making me a skirt, isn’t it? Because you’re so bloody tired of seeing me in this one!). Adorning the duck-rabbit’s feet, in what was, frankly, the only stylish touch, was, you’ve guessed it Natalie, those little green ballet pumps that were cast-offs from you, and which are very, very lovingly worn-in at this point. My hair was pulled into a scruffy ponytail.

But I would like to draw to your attention an important grooming adjustment that the duck-rabbit chose to make before going to back-to-school night.

It chose to remove the underpants from its head.

Now, wait. Now, hold on. Please just withhold your judgment and let me explain because it’s all going to become perfectly clear when I do. Here’s the thing. The duck-rabbit has shoulder-length hair and, in the summer months generally finds it most comfortable to wear its hair up, held up on top of its head with a large hair-clip or else pulled into a ponytail or knot of some kind secured with a hair elastic.

Now, sometimes, especially after transatlantic trips, the duck-rabbit’s supply of hair elastics and clips will go mysteriously missing, and there’ll be a drastic shortage with only a couple of hair elastics in circulation, and those two are themselves always being mislaid due to being taken off and shoved in various pockets and wrapped around the duck-rabbit’s wrist and then removed and fiddled with during an uncomfortable therapy session. Anyway, the point is, yesterday morning, it was warm and there were no elastics to be found, and the duck-rabbit just wanted to get its hair off its neck already, so it resorted to a tried and trusted method that it has employed ever since it was a teenager, which is to use a clean, and I want to emphasize this, clean pair of knickers (underwear to you my American friends; actually, it suddenly strikes me that I am actually not sure what American women call their underwear; you don’t really call them panties do you? Please tell me that you don’t. The word panties is just wrong.) to tie up my hair.

Whenever I do this, and I’ve done this on many, many occasions over the past 25 years or so, I am struck by how effectively the knickers perform this task. They’re soft, but also hold the hair really securely. (For those who want instructions, simply push your hair through the waist and one of the leg-holes and then loop the knickers around and around the ponytail/topknot as many times as necessary to secure it tightly. Honestly? There’s really no fixed technique: be creative!)

No, there’s only one rule you need to remember when utilizing the knickers-as-ponytail-holder solution, and that’s to remove the knickers from one’s hair before going out in public. The duck-rabbit always makes a concerted effort, when securing its hair in this, uh, fashion, to mentally note, “Remember this moment. I have just tied my hair up with a pair of knickers. I must certainly remember to replace said knickers with a respectable ponytail holder before venturing out in public.” There have been a goodly number of occasions in the duck-rabbit’s life when it has been, say, on the tube in London, and has reached up a hand to adjust its ponytail only to feel the soft fabric and immediately think, “Fuck! Left knickers in hair!” This is usually followed by the comforting thought, “Yeah, but nobody can really tell, can they?”

Now, as you read this I suspect that you may be thinking one of two things. Either, you may be thinking, “Yup, tried and true technique, one I’ve used myself on many an occasion.” Or you may be thinking, “I suspect she’s never done this before. Tying her hair up with knickers was just some silly stunt she pulled because she’s clearly casting about desperately for something to write about.”

Oh ye doubters! I could call several witnesses here, most important of whom would be my Mum. I suspect there may also be a couple of readers of this blog (Liz? SJ?) who have witnessed this behavior. I know for a fact that the conversation I had with He-Who-Must-Be-Preserved when I came down to have something to eat before going to back-to-school night, was an exchange that I have had several times in my life. It always goes the same way, which is the way it went here:

He-Who-Must-Be-Preserved: (Doing double take) Do you have underwear in your hair?”

Duck-rabbit: (Testily) Might do.

(Pause.)

He-Who-Must-Be-Preserved: Are they … are they clean?

Duck-rabbit: Yes they’re clean! Jesus! Why does everyone always ask that? (Shakes head, muttering, while hastily replacing the offending knickers with an elastic that it has just spotted and congratulating itself on the fact that, not only will it be attending back-to-school-night in the manner of a responsible parent, but it will also be attending said event without underwear in its hair.)[1]

So there I was, seething with misanthropy in the Cafetorium without underwear in my hair. When they finally released us from our pen and let us shuffle over to the classrooms to meet our children’s teachers, I was rather over-excited to discover that the lovely Sophisticate was seated just two uncomfortably small chairs down from me. I will admit to surreptitiously checking my hair once more just to make doubly-sure that I truly had removed the knickers from my hair, which indeed I had. We did not get a chance to speak or to be introduced, but I was able to observe that the lovely Sophisticate’s hair was now cropped short with a rakish quiff at the front. It was a kind of Eurythmics-era-Annie Lennox-meets-Elvis hairstyle, but she still wore the same Catherine-Deneuve-in-Belle-de-Jour clothes: a tweed pencil skirt and patent leather ankle-strap stilettos with four-inch heels. Simply marvelous.

The duck-rabbit enjoyed getting to see the elder flopsy-duckit’s classroom. Mounted on the wall were some short stories that the children had written and illustrated. Alongside another parent that I knew slightly, I scrutinized the wall searching for the elder flopsy-duckit’s story. The other parent found her son’s first.

“Oh my God!” she exclaimed in horror. “Look at it!” Turning to me, she went on, “You’re a Professor. What do you teach again?”

“Literature, English literature,” I replied.

“All right, well doesn’t this [pointing at her son’s story] look to you like the work of someone who is going to grow up to be schizophrenic?” she enquired.

I laughed a little nervously, uncertain whether or not she was joking, and proceeded to peer at the page in question, with its messy handwriting and inventive, busy drawings adorning the margins.

“No! I mean, I just think it’s very creative,” I pronounced authoritatively, speaking as the expert-on-handwriting-as-a-predictor-of-future-mental-health that I am, indeed, as all Professors are, regardless of whether their discipline has anything to do with child psychology. I continued, encouragingly, “I think it looks like the work of someone who is going to grow up to be an artist!”

The mom looked at me in horror. “Oh God. Don’t even say that.”

I was genuinely confused. I was trying to compliment her son but apparently I had said something very bad. This is what happens when you come from a family filled with artists.

I wandered out of the classroom, dazed and bewildered.

[1] I can’t help but wonder; have I here hit upon the one situation in which is important to remove one’s underpants before venturing out in order to avoid a breach of social decorum?

Duck and rabbit are each absorbed in their screens. Duck is glued to the U.S. Open. Rabbit appears to be reading The Guardian’s sports coverage on her laptop.

RABBIT: (Jubilant) By George, I’ve got it!

DUCK: (Irritated) Shhh! I’m watching Sharapova! This is tense! She just lost the first set!

RABBIT: (Ears quivering with excitement) But this is important. I’ve had a revelation.

DUCK: This isn’t about the flux capacitor again, is it, because I already know that it’s what makes time travel possible.

[Rabbit ignores Duck. Duck strains to look over his shoulder and see what Rabbit is looking at.]

[Incredulously] Are you looking at The Guardian’s sports pages?

RABBIT: I am. But not just the sports pages. No, I was barking up the wrong tree before. Football, I kept thinking. Or Bank Holiday weekend. Or editors all out of the office “working” somewhere on a beach. But it wasn’t any of that. No, it was cricket, and what I’m looking at, my friend, is coverage of the Indian national cricket team. [Triumphantly] And I’m confident that when you hear the facts you’ll agree that there are some pretty interesting coincidences.

DUCK: [Absorbed in his match] Ooh! Nice one Maria!

RABBIT: Do you want to hear the evidence?

DUCK: Do I have any choice?

RABBIT: Ooh, are we playing questions, just like Rosencrantz and Guildenstern?

DUCK: Who?

RABBIT: Shall I tell you about them?

DUCK: No. I’m trying to watch the tennis.

RABBIT: One-love!

[Duck puffs out his cheeks with air and then lets the air exhale slowly through his bill.]

DUCK: O.K. Look. Forget the game. Forget both of the games. Why don’t you just go ahead and tell me your evidence. Just go ahead. Go on. I’m listening.

RABBIT: [Speaking hurriedly] O.K. Very good. So, this summer, 2014, India are playing a five-match Test series against England, in England, for the first time since 1959. [Pauses meaningfully]

DUCK: [Seeing that some kind of response is called for] O.K.

RABBIT: I mean, it’s a historic occasion, really: the first five-Test match series played on British soil between a post-Nehru India and a post-Macmillan Britain.

[Duck nods sagely while surreptitiously checking the tennis match score on his phone.]

RABBIT: Fact. August 15^th: I send my final, approved typeset manuscript to my contact in Chennai. [Pauses again for effect]

DUCK: Yup, I’m with you so far.

RABBIT: Fact. August 15^th: The Guardian sports pages report that India put on a “dreadful batting performance” on Day 1 of the 5^th Test.

DUCK: Hang on a second, what does that even mean?

RABBIT: Dreadful means extremely poor.

DUCK: No, I know what dreadful means. What does “test” mean. Test of what?

RABBIT: [Authoritatively] Well, there are a series of tests prior to the actual cricket match. Let’s see [Counts off on his whiskers], there are five tests, with each in turn rigorously testing the team’s mental agility, dexterity, speed, endurance, and Godliness.

DUCK: Godliness?

RABBIT: Yes, well these traditions all obviously emanate from an earlier time.

DUCK: Just doesn’t seem very, I dunno, fair, that there’s a religious component to it.

RABBIT: Obviously, I agree with you. But I didn’t make up the rules, did I?

[Rabbit holds Duck’s gaze for several seconds without flinching. Finally Duck looks away and Rabbit smiles to herself.]

DUCK: All right. So what are the tests then?

RABBIT: Let’s see, the first one is a simple mental arithmetic test, the second is filbert cracking—oh, and here’s an interesting tidbit for you, the name “cricket” actually derives from this test. Originally it was “crackit,” you see, and filbert cracking was integral to the game. The third test is the number of burpees you can complete in one minute, the fourth is tea-drinking capacity, and the fifth, and most challenging and exalted of the tests is laundering.

DUCK: Laundering?

RABBIT: Yes, laundering. Each team has to launder, press, and finally don their cricket whites. Only then do they actually get to start the game of cricket.

DUCK: [Slowly] Where are you getting all this from? I think you might be getting some stuff mixed up here.

RABBIT: [Without a flicker of doubt] No. That’s what it is.

DUCK: But the report you just quoted said that India put in a “dreadful batting performance” on the 5^th Test.

RABBIT: And? What of it?

DUCK: Well, surely that implies they were, you know, batting the ball. Not, uh, laundering.

RABBIT: [Not missing a beat) Ah, yes, I see your confusion. No, they were using “batting” in the sense of using a batting-staff, or batting-lag, to bat the linens. It’s an old laundering term. Used frequently in the eighteenth century actually. So the point is that the Indian team did not fare well in the laundry round, due to their batting technique, and so, when the cricket actually starts they’ll be at a disadvantage because their whites will not be in tip-top shape.

DUCK: Huh. [Pause] I dunno. I mean, I don’t really know anything about cricket but it just seems strange that I’ve never heard about any of these pre-match tests before.

RABBIT: [Whiskers and voice stiffening] What are you saying?

DUCK: [Hastily] Oh, nothing, nothing …. Just that we all know … [Mutters something unintelligible under his breath]

RABBIT: [Extremely agitated] What did you just say?

DUCK: [Loudly] I just said that we all know that sometimes you can be a bit of a fantasist.

RABBIT: A fantasist? A fantasist? Look, I’ve done the research, O.K.? Have you done any research? No. No you haven’t. Cricket is a venerable game dating back to the sixteenth century.

DUCK: [Sarcastically] And they did burpees in the sixteenth century.

RABBIT: [Outraged] Yes, what, you don’t think people back then were smart enough to invent the burpee? That is just so typical, you’re such a, such a [Searches desperately for the vilest term of abuse she can muster], such a presentist.

DUCK: [Unruffled] Hey, I just always assumed burpees were the invention, if we’re going to credit them as such, of some sadistic twentieth-century calisthenics enthusiast, that’s all … there’s no need to get in a strop about it, I didn’t mean to upset you, carry on.

RABBIT: [Pouting] No, now you’ve thrown me off. And now that you’ve accused me of being a fantasist, obviously I now have to prove that burpees were around in the sixteenth century—

DUCK: [Interrupting] No, really you don’t. I totally believe you. The burpee. Invented in the sixteenth century. Obviously. I can’t think why I doubted you.

RABBIT: I see what you’re doing and it won’t work. If you’re going to accuse me of being a fantasist now you’re going to have to shut up and listen to some cold, hard, facts. [Inhales and then exhales deeply] O.K. Obviously, you know (or perhaps you don’t), but, in the sixteenth century most English subjects subsisted on little more than turnips, just pure, unadulterated turnips, with maybe a parsnip for pudding if you were exceptionally well off. Well, on that diet, when people had gas, it could be quite noxious. And so a custom developed that if you burped in the presence of a lady or one of your social betters, in order to make amends to the person you’d burped upon—to the burpee, that is—you would immediately bow very low before them and then, literally prostrate yourself on your stomach before the burpee. And the name burpee in time passed to from describing the person who had been burped upon to the motions performed by the burper. Given the levels of turnip ingestion, one might find yourself having to perform this feat several times in the course of one meal, so it was quite a test of physical strength as well as of honour. Why are you looking at me like that? What, you don’t believe me?

DUCK: No [Slowly, as if he can’t quite believe what he’s saying], no, it actually sounds almost plausible, actually. But where does cricket come in?

RABBIT: [Warming to her subject] Well, I’m glad you asked. It was simply that performing the burpee came to be regarded as a kind of test of one’s masculinity and one’s honour, and cricket was very much bound up with ideals of masculinity and so it was quite natural that it became integrated. (Pause) O.K. Can I FINALLY move on to what I actually wanted to tell you?

DUCK: Yes. I’m sorry I doubted you. I really do believe you now. Carry on.

RABBIT: [Relieved] O.K., well, we’ve already established that cricket is all about ideals of masculinity and that the highest test of this is the laundry test. Now listen to what The Guardian reporter said about the Indian team’s performance in this round. He said that they, and I quote, “displayed a lack of tenacity, determination and, yes, cojones.”

DUCK: Ouch!

RABBIT: Right! So, can you see where I’m going?

DUCK: Not quite but …

RABBIT: Well, obviously, this Test match is tapping into all of these long-simmering post-colonial issues. And the editor in Chennai doesn’t see our Indian ancestry. She doesn’t see that if we were to watch cricket, which, needless to say, we don’t, we would fail the Tebbit test. All she sees is someone who’s been emailing her all summer on Greenwich Mean Time, doesn’t she? And so, naturally, she wants to make a point.

DUCK: And the point is …?

RABBIT: And the point is, I’m not going to kow-tow to your imperialist demands to confirm receipt of your manuscript while your nation’s media disparages the cojones of my nation’s cricket team. Are you with me?

DUCK: Sort of.

RABBIT. O.K. So this would all be very discouraging except that things are now looking up for India. Listen to this headline from today: August 27, “England were annihilated by India.” So…

DUCK: So….

RABBIT: So I think she’ll get in touch now! She won’t be moping around anymore!

DUCK: I’m not saying that your theory doesn’t make sense ….

RABBIT: Good. Glad to hear that that’s not what you’re saying …

DUCK: …but has it ever occurred to you that perhaps it’s just that it’s the dog days of August, and she’ll probably be in touch next week?

RABBIT: [Wrinkles her nose, giving this question serious consideration. Then, slowly]: No …… no, I’m pretty sure it’s the cricket.

DUCK: Right then.

Rabbit resumes refreshing The Guardian’s cricket blog while Duck resumes watching the US Open.

Yesterday was the day the Duck-Rabbit finally got up the nerve to drive to campus, return all the overdue library books, beg the librarian to cancel its fines (success!), and check its mailbox. The Duck-Rabbit contemplated the prospect of driving to work with just the tiniest bit of anxiety. You see, the Duck-Rabbit had not driven a car in six weeks.

“What if I’ve forgotten how to drive?” the Duck-Rabbit asked He-Who-Must-Be-Preserved, anxiously.

“Ermmmm, I don’t think that’s how it works. It’s not something you forget. It’s like—”

“Don’t say it’s like riding a bike!” the Duck-Rabbit interrupted.

“Uh. Why?” He-Who-Must-Be-Preserved looked perplexed.

The Duck-Rabbit shot him a wounded expression. “Don’t say you’ve forgotten? I had to learn how to ride a bike twice. I learned one summer and then the next summer I said, I’ve forgotten, and everyone said that’s not how it works, you can’t forget, so I said oh, okay, and then I got on the bike and promptly fell off and it took me the whole summer, six weeks of my cousin chasing behind me holding the back of my bike seat, for me to re-learn it.”

“Ahh. Yes. I’d forgotten that,” said He-Who-Must-Be-Preserved, weakly.

When you’re a duck-rabbit, words like “foolproof,” or phrases like, “It’s not the kind of thing you can mess up,” fill you with fear.

When the Duck-Rabbit confesses things like this, people look at it sympathetically and say reassuring things like, “I know exactly what you mean.” But then the Duck-Rabbit, letting its guard down, will make a grave error of judgment by giving an example, like, say,

“Yeah, I mean people say when they give you directions, ‘you can’t mess it up.’ Or, you know, ‘just use the GPS.’ But then, it’s so easy to get confused, like that time I started driving onto the 10 freeway using the off-ramp.”

And then the sympathetic expression vanishes from people’s faces.

“Jesus fucking Christ, are you serious? You’re not serious are you? Are you? You drove onto the freeway using the off-ramp.”

“Yeah, well, I didn’t get all the way onto the freeway. I mean I figured it out and turned around.”

“You figured it out and turned around. Right.”[1]

The point is that the Duck-Rabbit was a little apprehensive about driving after six long weeks of not driving. But it had a trick up its sleeve to coax itself into getting back behind the wheel of its trusty Prius, oh yes. I’m going to tell you what the trick was, and then you should prepare yourself for the best 1 minute and 45 seconds of your weekend, right here, courtesy of the Duck-Rabbit. You’re welcome.

What the Duck-Rabbit did is pull an Alan Partridge on its drive to work, which it was able to do because it had downloaded “Cuddly Toy” by Roachford from iTunes expressly for this purpose.

If you have no idea what I’m talking about, here, go watch this link, and then come back. I’ll wait.

It was, hands down, the Duck-Rabbit’s best commute to work ever.[2] Highly recommended.

Also, whoever is compiling my Tenure-party playlist; I want that on there.

Not only did the Duck-Rabbit go to its office yesterday but it also started, reluctantly, thinking more seriously about work again. In particular, it finally felt ready to sit down and re-visit an essay that’s been on the back-burner for ages.

Here’s the back story. Back in 2011, I started writing an essay about how eighteenth-century epistemology engaged in thought-experiments that functioned as a kind of precursor of “virtual reality.” I was quite pleased with it. Get a load of me, I thought, connecting the Enlightenment to new media. But then I showed the essay to a new media scholar, and also to a video-game-industry veteran (that would be He-Who-Must-Be-Preserved) and they both said the same thing: virtual reality is a totally dead concept within the field. It’s just so nineties. It’s practically a dirty word. Get rid of all the virtual reality stuff. I was disappointed, but I did what they said. Not only that, I put in a few snarky comments about how virtual reality was just so obsolete and submitted it to a prestigious journal and, lo and behold they liked it, gave me a few suggestions, and told me to revise and resubmit it.

I received their request to revise and resubmit the essay on March 1 2014.

Then, on March 24, Facebook bought Oculus Rift for 400 bazillion dollars.

Fucking hell.

But still, I thought, it’s a flash in the pan. In a few months all the hype will die down and people will remember that virtual reality is totally obsolete; it’s a joke; who wants clunky headsets, right? Right?

But then at my birthday party in July I was talking to a friend (Henry!) who works in animation and who had just experienced the Game of Thrones “Ascend the Wall” Oculus VR experience, and he told me that he was blown away by it.

It’s the way things are headed, he said.

Fucking fucking hell.

So, anyway, I got distracted, as you may recall, by indexing, but as of yesterday I’m back at work revising the essay and desperately trying to find a way to take back all the stuff I said about VR being obsolete without re-writing the whole thing yet again.

OK, so here’s what I’ve got. VR is one paradigm: a fantasy of complete immersion in an alternate space. The other paradigm, the one I’m interested in, is more pervasive within our daily lives and perhaps also less visible as a paradigm precisely because we take it for granted. This other paradigm is one of toggling back and forth between immersion in different worlds. It’s the paradigm that underlies, not the Oculus Rift, but casual gaming and, moreover, the way, for better or worse, in our everyday lives, we continually shift between attention to our screens and to the world around us. This flitting back and forth between worlds, virtual and physical, is the default position that we inhabit in our daily lives. Maybe you’re doing it at the moment: right now you’re reading this sentence on your phone, but then a second or two later your eyes will glance up and re-attend to your cup of coffee, to the document on your monitor, to the words, “you’re not listening to a word I’m saying, are you?” that your spouse is uttering to you right now.

I’m not making an original point here, of course. Usefully, for my article, skeptics of VR include people other than some random English Professor who specializes in eighteenth-century literature, people such as (Id co-founder and Doom developer) John Romero, who suggests that VR’s fantasy of singular immersion is out of step with the role of technology in the rest of our lives.

Naturally, my essay turns to David Hume to argue that his playful philosophical practice—one in which you constantly step in and out of the medium of experience to observe yourself in the act of perceiving—is a precursor of our present-day toggling between different realities.

But this stepping-in-and-out-of-reality is something the Duck-Rabbit thinks about not only in relation to Hume but also when playing with the younger flopsy-duckit. Yesterday morning, for example, right before the Duck-Rabbit drove to work, it was hanging out with the younger flopsy-duckit, who proposed that she and the Duck-Rabbit play a game. The impetus for the game was a plastic desert island, part of some kind of pirate toy that the YFD had inherited from her brother. The island is a three-dimensional version of one of those cartoon desert islands with a single palm tree. The set consists of a yellow plastic base with various attachments that can be stuck into it: a palm tree, a fern, some logs with little plastic flames coming out of them. There’s also a small row boat should you wish to try your luck at leaving the island.

The YFD’s idea was that we would populate the island using creatures from her box of miscellaneous animals. Important to the game was that she was, in effect, the benevolent deity presiding over the island while I was her minion. She would issue edicts and I would enact them. Kind of a Prospero-Ariel thing. So, for example, the first two animals she chose were Godzilla and a unicorn and it was my job to set them up on the island. Now, I questioned this choice. I submitted that Godzilla might eat the unicorn, but I was overruled, so set them up I did.

They were soon joined by others, eventually about fifteen or more. We had a good range of domestic, wild, extinct, and imaginary animals, of all scales. Curiously, the dinosaurs were dwarfed by many of the domestic animals, and a rubber cuttlefish was the biggest of all, lying, bloated on the beach. Once we’d gotten up to seven or so animals, real estate on the island was getting increasingly scarce, a concern I raised with my boss. “I just don’t think there’s room for any more,” I explained. “See, if we bring any more animals in the others are going to fall into the water.” Here, the YFD gazed at me perplexedly, as if I had exposed myself as a simpleton of astounding fatuousness. “But it’s just carpet,” she pointed out. “They’ll be fine.”

“Right. Of course. It’s just carpet.”

This is what I find so unnerving and endlessly fascinating: the YFD’s ability to flip back and forth so effortlessly between worlds.

It was my job, as I knew it would be, to do voices for all of the animals. And, on this occasion, as I often observe when called upon to provide voices (“Mommy, make her/him/it talk” is probably the sentence my daughter utters to me more than any other), the YFD gave the animal who was being made to “talk” her full attention, asking it concerned questions and listening attentively to “its” responses. She even asked me at one point, in a rather poetic sounding phrase, “How do you speak the language of the animals?”

This is what throws the Duck-Rabbit … that the YFD is one second saying, “Duh, it’s a carpet,” and the next asking, quite sincerely, how I can make the animals speak.[3]

As we were playing, yesterday, I found myself thinking, perhaps inevitably given our island setting, about Defoe, and specifically about a definition of Providence that he offers in The History and Reality of Apparitions (1727): he says that Providence is “the administration of heaven’s government in the world.” Let’s just say that while playing this game I was acutely aware of the tedious admin involved in implementing our benevolent deity’s will. I was the “special providence,” in eighteenth-century terms, which essentially means that all of the day-to-day drudgery of managing food distribution and preventing anarchy was on me.[4] The YFD, on the other hand, was “general providence,” a kind of armchair deity, just sitting back and issuing decrees and leaving me to sort out the logistics.

And the YFD’s vision of our little island community was terribly utopian. Whereas the Duck-Rabbit’s was rather more Hobbesian. “Who’s in charge here?” the Duck-Rabbit enquired. “Is it Godzilla? He’s the fiercest.” “They’re all in charge,” insisted the YFD. “And there are no meanies.”

“Okay, but what are they supposed to do about food? There’s no food and they’re beginning to get agitated.”

The YFD pointed to the fern and the palm tree. “They can eat these.”

The YFD’s vision was, you see, of a happy band of vegans, as a woman of great wit once put it.

Ahh, if only life could be so simple. The Duck-Rabbit felt obliged to point out that Godzilla was not on board with the YFD’s vision: “He’s looking hungrily at the unicorn. Things are going to turn ugly if you don’t step in.”

After a quick consultation, the YFD made the executive decision to airlift in plastic ice-cream for everyone. Godzilla got coffee ice-cream with chocolate sprinkles and the unicorn got vanilla with rainbow sprinkles. There was enough for everyone. Crisis averted.

A happy band of creatures living in peace eating ice cream. Sounds like paradise, right? Well, you know what comes next, then.

The YFD couldn’t leave well enough alone. She started messing with them, blessing them with gifts that were bound to cause trouble. For example: a single plastic French fry; a single green jewel; a single toy ninja. Are you sensing a theme here? I would protest on behalf of my constituents, saying, “look, there are more than fifteen of them here, what are we supposed to do with one French fry??” “They can share,” she would declare, beatifically. What about the jewel? “You must take turns,” she insisted sternly, to the unicorn, who was fighting over it with Godzilla.

At this point, He-Who-Must-Be-Preserved came in and the Duck-Rabbit handed over management of the island to him and stepped back into the real world in order to drive to work. That is say, it stepped into its car and pretended to be Steve Coogan pretending to be Alan Partridge pretending to be Andrew Roachford pretending to be Sly Stone.

It was a good day.

Notes.

[1] In the Duck-Rabbit’s defence, her driving instructor, who taught her to drive in L.A., also boasted to her on several occasions that he had also been Paris Hilton’s driving instructor.

[2] It has been suggested to me that this scene is only mildly funny if you do not recall the 1989 smash hit, “Cuddly Toy,” a song that has the killer combo of both an infectiously catchy tune and utterly absurd lyrics.

[3] It’s important to note here that the Duck-Rabbit is not some kind of master ventriloquist. It makes no effort whatsoever to disguise the fact that its lips are moving and all the animals have the same, cartoonish, high-pitched American-accented voices. I try to give some of them low voices but the YFD insists they must all be high. And why do they all have American accents? I think it must be because I think of them as cartoon animals and the cartoon animals I grew up with all had American accents, with a few marvelous exceptions. Also, the Duck-Rabbit finds voicing the animals extremely tedious and therefore puts very little creative effort into the endeavor.

[4] I was like the creature in the God game Black and White, with the YFD inhabiting the God role. As in real life, I find playing at completing mindless chores extremely tedious. The fact that I find this tedious explains why I am mystified by the popularity of games like Farmville.

Six weeks was enough time for the duck-rabbit’s eye to adjust. Things stand out here, now, their outlines sharp: the jagged black shapes the trees make against the bright sky at twilight; the curves of the Priuses silently cruising down the wide streets; the angles of those killer cheekbones; the indentations in those exposed deltoids. This latter quality was particularly in evidence as we walked the elder flopsy-duckit to the first day of fourth-grade. Now, I could engage in all sorts of cheap shots at the abundance of expensive highlights and tanned, taut, improbably middle-aged flesh, but that would be too easy and kind of boring, and also, yes, unkind.[1] No, today, in the spirit of Mr. Fielding, although the language will be mocking, the admiration is, I swear to God, sincere: I want to tell you about a genuine style icon of the schoolyard, a parent whom I’ve never met but with whom I’ve been just slightly obsessed ever since the elder flopsy-duckit started kindergarten because this mother’s impeccable, distinctive style is so gloriously out-of-sync with the prevailing Westside Mom aesthetic.

[Cough]

Umm … yes?

DUCK: Okay, we’ll take it from here.

RABIDDUCKWIT: Sorry?

DUCK: We just think this is one for us.

RABBIT: I hate to say it, but he’s right. This is just not a subject for first-person, confessional musing … (Hastily) Not that that doesn’t have its charms, I’m sure! The point is: this subject requires Duck’s ability for vulgar gawking and my ability for sublime effusion.

RABIDDUCKWIT: (Sullenly) Fine, fine.

DUCK: (Clearing his throat.). Right then. We are proud to present “A short hint of what we can do in the sublime, and a description of Ms Sophisticate Westsider.” This one goes out to all of you dix-huitièmistes out there with apologies to everyone else, who might want to skip the rest of this post.[2] In fact, someone who just read a draft of this dispatch made the compelling point that we, Duck-Rabbit, are quite possibly the only ones in the universe who will find the following amusing, given that we are very likely the only beings in the universe who inhabit the intersection of the Venn diagram that constitutes those who a) know who is being described b) are intimately acquainted with Tom Jones, and c) will get all the sixties fashion references. So be it. It is our duck-rabbit hole, after all. Are you ready, class? Open your copies of Tom Jones to Book 4, Chapter 2:

“Hushed be every cell phone. May the heathen ruler of the winds confine in iron chains both the vacuous talk that fouls the air, and the lip-chapping breath of Santa Ana. Do thou, sweet Zephyrus, rising from thy yoga mat, mount the Western sky, and lead on those delicious gales, the charms of which call forth the lovely Angelena from her chamber, perfumed with non-toxic dews, when on the 19th of August, back-to-school day, the blooming babe, in Lululemon attire, gently trips down fair Montana Ave., where every barista rises to do her homage, till the whole street becomes sugar-free and non-fat, and smoothies contend with lattes which shall ravish her most.

So incongruous may she now appear! and you the feathered choristers of nature, whose sweetest notes not even Katy Perry can excel, tune your melodious throats to celebrate her appearance. From love proceeds your music, and to love it returns. Awaken therefore that gentle passion in every dude: for lo! adorned with all the charms in which nature yoked with art can array her; bedecked with beauty, maturity, sprightliness, knowingness, and modesty—yes, modesty—breathing old-school glamour from her perfectly blotted lips, and darting brightness from her sparkling eyes, the lovely Sophisticate comes!

Reader, perhaps thou hast seen the statuesque dames from Mad Men. Perhaps, too, thou hast seen the gallery of beauties at The Sartorialist. Thou may’st remember each bright Deneuve of the galaxy, and all the toasts of the Marmont. Or, if their reign was before thy times, at least thou hast seen their daughters, the no less dazzling beauties of the present age; whose names, should we here insert, we apprehend they would fill the whole screen.

Now if thou hast seen all these, be not afraid of the rude answer which Lady Gaga once gave to a man who had seen many things. No. If thou hast seen all these without knowing what beauty is, thou hast no eyes; if without feeling its power, thou hast no heart.

Yet is it possible, my friend, that thou mayest have seen all these without being able to form an exact idea of the Sophisticate; for she did not exactly resemble any of them. She was most like the picture of Diana Rigg: and, in hair colour, at least, more still to the famous Joan Holloway; but least of all she resembled the 1970s mothers of my memory, whose cherished image never can depart from my breast, and yet, it must be said, that, if thou picture the inverse of their bare-faced beauty and loose attire, their leggings and oversized CND T-shirts, thou hast then, my friend, an adequate idea of the Sophisticate.[3]

But lest this should not have been thy fortune, we will endeavour with our utmost skill to describe this paragon, though we are sensible that our highest abilities are very inadequate to the task.

The Sophisticate, then, the only daughter, I speculate, of West-Coast glamour and East-Coast polish, was a small-sized woman; but rather inclining to tall. Her shape was not only svelte, but extremely delicate: and the nice proportion of her jacket promised the truest symmetry in all her clothes. Her hair, which was red, was so luxuriant, that it might have reached her middle, before she cut it at a razor sharp angle—think Mary Quant—a red Sassoon bob in a sea of beachy waves; and it was now blow-dried so gracefully in her neck, that few could believe it to be her own work. Her eyebrows were full, even, and arched beyond the power of amateurs to imitate. Her nose was exactly regular and her mouth, in which were two rows of ivory, was red and soft. Her green eyes had a lustre in them, which all her softness could not extinguish., and, exactly answered Dolly Parton’s description in those lines:—

Your beauty is beyond compare
With flaming locks of auburn hair
With ivory skin and eyes of emerald green

Her cheeks were of the rounded kind, which the curve-hugging line of her pencil skirt discovered. Her complexion had rather more of the lily than of the rose; but when spinning or Pilates increased her natural colour, no vermilion could equal it. One might cry out that surely she followed the strictures of the celebrated Gwyneth:

Add some cream blush … on the apples of cheeks. Pick a color similar to the color your skin changes to when you flush after some good exercise.

Her heels were high and finely turned: and here, if I was not afraid of offending her delicacy, I might justly say, that the height of the heel served to tilt her pelvis just so, such that the finest hourglasses of Blackman, Bardot, et al were outdone. Here was a silhouette which no Spanx nor air-brushing could match. The softest leather might indeed be supposed from envy to cover that figure which was much more supple than itself.—She was indeed,

            The Thinking Person’s Crumpet.

            [i.e. the preferred choice of a person of discerning taste]

Such was the outside of the Sophisticate; I cannot say whether this beautiful frame is disgraced by an inhabitant unworthy of it. For, indeed, I do not know her. All I am certain of is that I will never see her do the school run attired in Juicy Couture, flip flops, or Daisy Dukes. And in a sea of boho beach chic (and when one is, one must make abundantly clear, oneself barely rolled out of bed, and attired in unwashed jeans and an inside-out T-shirt), one can only gaze, awestruck, at her unflagging commitment to formal beauty. As to her character; to speculate would be a kind of tacit affront to our reader’s understanding, and may also rob her of that pleasure which she will receive in forming her own judgment.”

***

RABIDDUCKWIT: Well, I must say that was not bad.

RABBIT: Yes, we captured her quite well, don’t you think, Duck?

DUCK: Dunno … seems to me you used an awful lot of words to make the point that she was indescribable. I mean, surely, this is why we have camera phones.

RABIDDUCKWIT: Bloody hell, what are you, my inner critic?

DUCK: You’ve got it the wrong way round, mate. You’re the critic. That’s the problem, innit? I’m your inner enthusiast. I just want to enjoy life’s simple pleasures. Be in the moment instead of tap-tap-tapping away at that laptop. You should try it some time.

RABIDDUCKWIT: Oh, I will, I will. In November. I have it on good authority that an excellent technique for finding fulfillment in life is to defer experiencing any simple pleasures until you’ve achieved all of your goals. (Rabbit nods vigorously.) Then and only then do you sit back and enjoy life. Until then, you just put all joy on hold. (Rabbit can be seen mouthing this phrase silently to herself like a mantra.) It’s a completely foolproof system for achieving long-lasting happiness. God, it’ll be great when I achieve all my goals and can finally relish those simple pleasures you speak of. Can’t wait!

[1] Also: for the record, some of my best friends are blond. And oh-so-toned. And, like, the smartest people I know. Have I mentioned that life is unfair?

[2] With the exception of readers (by which I mean reader) with kids at the same school. Let’s be frank, I mean you, Chris. And, if you dare to suggest that you don’t know who I am talking about, I will say that you are a liar. Either a liar or singularly unobservant.

[3] Actually, I think she most resembles Carol Rance from Episodes, but I have a strong feeling that only Natalie and Jonny will know who I mean.

The plot must thicken, inevitably, because now we’ve left Queen’s Wood, crossed the Archway Road and headed up Muswell Hill Road, nipped across Highgate High Street, cut through Pond Square, wended our way down Swain’s Lane, and are poised to enter the ivy-strewn, mossy landscape of Highgate cemetery. Ready?

The cemetery is about a five-minute walk from the duck-rabbit’s London residence, which is itself across the square from the flat where the duck-rabbit’s mother has lived for several years. Nonetheless, it occurred to the duck-rabbit, as it trudged down Swain’s Lane towards the cemetery’s East gate, that it had not been there since it was itself a flopsy-duckit, when her primary school class had made a special pilgrimage to visit Karl Marx’s grave.

The cemetery opened in 1839, but the East side, which was our destination today, was not added till 1860. The West cemetery, which lies on the other side of Swain’s Lane, can only be visited by guided tour, and is only open to children eight and older, so we were giving it a miss this time. The West cemetery (which the duck-rabbit has never visited) does sound awfully enticing though, with bags of melancholic Victorian atmosphere: catacombs; Christina Rossetti’s gravestone; an “Egyptian” avenue; and a mausoleum Julius Beer built in memory of his daughter, Ada, who died aged eight. (Is that why they don’t let children under eight in, the duck-rabbit found itself wondering? Because they think that if you’re seven, you’re more likely to think, this could still totally happen to me, whereas if you’re already eight you think, the odds seem good, at this point, that I will not die of consumption before my ninth birthday. Huzzah!) The duck-rabbit was also sorry to miss Michael Faraday’s grave. Next time. Not that the East side doesn’t have its fair share of celebs: in addition to Marx, the most famous other resident is probably George Eliot.

It was the perfect, slightly drizzly morning for visiting the cemetery. On this visit, the duck-rabbit found itself underwhelmed by the gargantuan pomposity of Marx’s grave and uninspired by George Eliot’s memorial. Instead, it found itself responding to the sly humor of some of the more recent additions. For example, consider the inscription that graces the headstone of Malcolm McLaren, manager of The Sex Pistols:

“Better a spectacular failure, than a benign success.”

The duck decided that henceforth this line would be its guiding motto. The rabbit rolled its eye.

But the favorite of duck and rabbit both was the gravestone that pop artist Patrick Caulfield designed for himself. It’s simultaneously surprising, beautiful, and witty:

D-E-A-D.

Is that an example of a dispondee? A desponding dispondee, perhaps?

The duck-rabbit has been hoping with all its might that its book may finally be D-E-A-D. Not “dead-born from the press,” you understand. No, I mean that the duck-rabbit hopes that all that tortuous checking of the index, line by bloody line, stab by tiny stab, might have incrementally produced the equivalent effect of having plunged a stake into the heart of the production process.

The last couple of days the duck-rabbit got out of the kitchen/hatch and did the indexing in Le Pain Quotidien (or, as its phone would have it, when it was texting its location to He-Who-Must-Be-Preserved, “indexing in pain quotidian,” which was an auto-correction of rare insight).[1] Anyway, the point is: the duck-rabbit has now given its “final approval to text and index,” as requested … which means that the book is really dead, right? It won’t re-animate or come back to haunt me; right?

I don’t know. I haven’t heard back from the press.

What does that mean?

Adding to the inherent difficulty of parsing an absence of communication is the fact that the press outsources the oversight of the book’s production to a company in Chennai, India. Now, the duck-rabbit fully appreciates that outsourcing this tedious process to India saves the press no end of labor. But what the press doesn’t seem to appreciate is the additional imaginative labor with which this decision burdens their poor, beleaguered, authors. For, you see, now when the duck-rabbit doesn’t hear back from the press, as well as going through its usual set of rationalizations like, “Ooh, it must be a bank holiday,” or, “England must have got through to the next round and everyone’s down the pub,” or, “it’s the second half of August; everyone in the UK is in Spain,” it now also has to undertake the additional imaginative labor of speculating about Indian holidays, for example; “August 15th is Indian Independence Day. That’s why no-one is answering my emails.”

Life is very hard.

It is with the book given the authorial Seal of Approval, then, and sent back into the void, that the duck-rabbit bids farewell to London for the time being, leaving behind homemade sloe gin and wild plum compote that He-Who-Must-Be-Preserving made for our generous hosts. To make sloe gin, the duck-rabbit has recently learned, you steep sloes in gin, store the bottle in a cool dark place, shake it gently periodically, and then open it three months later. Sounds like a pretty good way to get through the fall of one’s tenure year, doesn’t it? Soak me in gin, store me in a cool, dark place, give me a gentle shake every now and again, and then open me in November.

Yes, the duck-rabbit is ready to hibernate, dormouse style. As Lord Byron once wrote (with only the tiniest bit of poetic license taken), “when one subtracts from life indexing (which is vegetation), sleep, eating and swilling, buttoning and unbuttoning — how much remains of downright existence? The summer of a dormouse.”[2] The duck-rabbit hopes to—yes, Paul!—uncurl and enjoy that sweet summer after The Vote of Density. Until then, it will be sleeping, eating and swilling, buttoning and unbuttoning as well as, never fear, dear readers, blogging.

Yours very truly,

Your very own furry, web-footed

Rabid Duckwit

[1] My feelings about Le Pain Quotidien are conflicted. On the one hand, as I discovered this summer, it’s handy to have one across the street from where you live, should you be in urgent need of a Belgian chocolate brownie. On the other hand, it’s McDonald’s for the bourgeoisie, isn’t it? Every Le Pain Quotidien in every country is exactly the same, down to the rustically daubed walls and the supercilious service. I’m not exactly sure why I find its uniformity more depressing than the uniformity of McDonald’s or Starbucks or other chains. Maybe it’s that the Oh-this-old-thing?-We-just-picked-this-up-at-our-local-Belgian-flea-market aesthetic jars when it’s a chain’s signature. Also, just because the baked goods are whole wheat, why does everything have to be rendered in a tasteful palette of browns and creams? Is everything in Belgium actually sepia-tinged?

[2] Again, I have John Mortimer to thank for this quote; he used The Summer of the Dormouse as the title of his memoir. And I have the Radio 4 show, “Quote .. Unquote” to thank for pointing me to both this John Mortimer quote, and the “plot at last” one. God, I love Radio 4. Couldn’t have gotten through the indexing without it.

And not just any old plot, dear readers, but a spooky one, which is the best kind.[1] Spooky plots, plural, to be precise, and their names are Queen’s Wood and Highgate Cemetery. Narratively speaking, these plots both wander and wind before finally coming to rest, as all plots do, with death.

Or perhaps (and that’s the point of this dispatch’s title, courtesy of John Mortimer), death, on the contrary, is not the end of plot but an opportunity to seize a new one and, moreover, to shift genres.[2] The zombie I saw in Queen’s Wood certainly seemed to be experiencing no dearth of plot. But the duck-rabbit is getting ahead of itself.

Queen’s Wood, you may recall, was briefly mentioned a few dispatches back as the location of a summer fair where the elder flopsy duckit had woven his willow crown. Before the crown-weaving, there was a scavenger hunt. We hadn’t necessarily known that we wanted to embark on a scavenger hunt as we wandered idly into the woods, but the three middle-aged kindly looking women who were sitting at a makeshift table at the wood’s entrance soon beckoned us over and set us straight.

One of the ladies hailed He-Who-Must-Be-Preserved: “Are you a Friend of Queen’s Wood?”

There was a pause.

“Well,” offered He-Who-Must-Be-Preserved, uncertainly, “I’m not an enemy of the Wood.”

The ladies explained that they represented the Friends of Queen’s Wood and tried to get us to join their cult, enticing us with the prospect of regular newsletters. We demurred, and, unfazed, they encouraged us instead to embark on a scavenger hunt.

And so we set off. At first it was just the duck-rabbit, the elder flopsy-duckit and the duck-rabbit’s mother while He-Who-Must-Be-Preserved wheeled the younger flopsy-duckit around in her stroller, trying to get her to sleep. We turned out, unexpectedly, the child, the old woman, and the absent-minded duck-rabbit, to be a scavenging unit of deadly efficiency. Hornbeam seeds? Done. Holly? Done. An acorn? This is too fucking easy. Done. And so on and so forth.

But while we aced the collecting portion of the scavenger hunt, we fell apart when it came to finding specific places within the wood. We stood, the three of us, contemplating a small bog. “Could this could be the Frog Pool?” asked the duck-rabbit’s mother, doubtfully. We were starting to tire. Then He-Who-Must-Be-Preserved showed up, the younger flopsy-duckit now sleeping soundly in her stroller. Feeling drowsy too, the duck-rabbit elected to sit in the middle of the wood with the sleeping flopsy-duckit, while the others went on valiantly in search of the one remaining item on the scavenger hunt list: to count the number of trees surrounding the Witches’ Coven. They walked off down the path, deeper into the woods, their voices soon growing faint.

The duck-rabbit sat for a while, looking up at the trees and listening to the birds. But, eventually, bored of sitting, and with no sign of the others returning, it decided to take a walk. Slowly, the duck-rabbit made its way down the hill, deeper into the woods, gingerly pushing the sleeping babe in her stroller down the gravelly path. It grew darker as the path dipped down steeply and the trees grew thicker. And that’s when the duck-rabbit saw them, a group of figures, way off the path, only faintly visible through the trees. Craning its neck, the duck-rabbit strained to get a better look and saw a man with a camera on his shoulder; a boom operator with one of those proper dead-cats-on-a-stick; a woman with a clapperboard; another woman in some kind of futuristic looking armor; and finally, yes, a zombie, unmistakably a zombie, who caught the duck-rabbit’s eye and flashed it a mega-watt grin.

Be still my heart.

The actors assumed their positions. The clapper-board was clapped. Someone yelled “Action!” And then the zombie and the woman warrior proceeded to have a good old-fashioned knock-down fight. The woman seemed to be getting the best of the zombie, leaping on his back, but then losing her grip and falling to the ground with a thud at which everyone broke into giggles and someone yelled “Cut!”

 ***

As we walked back to the entrance with all but one of the items for the scavenger hunt discovered, the duck-rabbit explained breathlessly to the others how the zombie had smiled at it through the branches. When we arrived back to the three Ladies of the Wood, who were now sipping steaming mugs of tea and eating cake from the Queen’s Wood Café, they had been joined by a shy young man who seemed to be an expert on the local botany. He and the ladies together looked over the contents of our little box of treasures, and authenticated our discoveries; hornbeam seeds; yes; holly; yes; acorn; yes; and they also commended the elder flopsy-duckit on his discovery of a leaf from the rare and oddly named Wild Service tree.

But we were forced to concede that, in the intelligence-gathering portion, we had failed in our bid to verify the number of trees surrounding The Witch’s Coven because we had been unable to find the Coven. One of the ladies enlightened us. Thirteen oak trees surround the clearing known as The Witch’s Coven. “And witches still gather there,” added the lady brightly. “But,” she added, on seeing the elder flopsy-duckit’s furrowed brow, “they’re White Witches.” She paused. “At least we hope they are,” she added darkly. The elder flopsy-duckit looked at her uncertainly.

The duck-rabbit mentioned the film crew it had seen and asked the ladies if they knew what was being filmed. “Filming? No-one’s filming at the moment,” one of the ladies said a little sharply. “They have to ask our permission if they want to film,” she explained. “They have to pay us.” Were they perhaps film students just larking around, she asked the duck-rabbit? Not wanting to get her zombie into trouble, the duck-rabbit answered yes, they must have been students.

It turned out to be one of those scavenger hunts where the “prize” for completing it, to the elder-flopsy duckit’s disappointment, was the satisfaction of learning about the history, flora, and fauna of Queen’s Wood. We decided we needed a better reward than that so we headed to the café to get our own tea and cake. There was chocolate cake for the flopsy-duckits and carrot cake for the grown-ups.

“I’m afraid it’s a bit warm because I just took it out of the oven,” said the lady serving us, apologetically, because we all know how disgusting warm cake is.

“Ooh, lovely,” my mum and I said in unison.

Stay tuned. The plot is about to thicken.

[1] Even the duck-rabbit’s daughter knows this and she’s only three and a half. This morning the duck-rabbit asked its daughter what her favorite kind of story was. Scary stories, she answered without hesitation. “Tell me one, then,” replied the duck-rabbit. “No. Only at night. Only in the dark,” said the younger flopsy-duckit. “Is the dark scary?” enquired the duck-rabbit; “are you scared of the dark?” Again, without hesitation, and with an assuredness that took the duck-rabbit’s breath away, the younger flopsy-duckit replied, “I’m not scared of anything.”

[2] This comes from a quip from the late John Mortimer, who in a column in which he was bemoaning his writer’s block, observed, “I think of the poor playwright who had written on his tombstone the simple words: ‘A plot at last.’

The other day, we were walking back through the Queen Elizabeth Olympic Park after a lovely afternoon spent lolling on the grass and playing at the Tumbling Bay playground. We were wending our way back to Hackney Wick overground station when we noticed a few people walking by in 1950s getup. The women wore poodle skirts, their faces made up and their hair upswept or set in waves. The men had greased-back hair and wore check (plaid) shirts and trousers (pants) held up with braces (suspenders). As several couples passed us on the path we decided they must be on their way to a swing-dancing class, or something like that.

But then something funny happened. They kept coming. And coming. And coming, with their poodle skirts and greased-back hair, by the dozen, in scores, by the hundreds, and still they kept coming. “Oh my God,” exclaimed my friend, the very same friend who witnessed the UFOs from her bedroom window all those years ago, “there are literally thousands of them!” “Well,” replied the duck-rabbit, ever on its guard against unwarranted wild pronouncements, “I think that’s a bit of an exaggeration. I think it’s very difficult to get a real sense of the numbers. Surely it’s not thousands. A few hundred, to be sure.” And then the duck-rabbit turned the corner and gasped.

“Great Scott, there are thousands!” exclaimed the duck-rabbit in astonishment. The duck-rabbit’s friend, to her immense credit, somehow managed to arrange her features into an expression of studied neutrality with nary an eye-roll nor a glimmer of a pursed lip.

But, readers, there were, literally, thousands of them. The duck-rabbit’s friend, who is clearly much better at figuring things out than the duck-rabbit, deduced that the crowds were on their way to a Secret Cinema screening. Secret Cinema, if you haven’t heard of it, is a London-based organization that holds “experiential” movie screenings, which usually involve elaborate recreations of scenes from the film being shown, and with attendees required to show up dressed in character.

Once we’d figured this out, the guessing game began. Rebel Without a Cause suggested the duck-rabbit. But none of the attendees looked, er, rebellious enough. West Side Story? Na. The men weren’t quite slick enough to be Sharks or Jets. Then there was a clue: an usher with a sign that read “This way to the Hill Valley Spring Fair.” Hill Valley; the name sounded familiar, but it still didn’t click into place. The duck-rabbit’s friend cut to the chase and simply asked the usher what the film was. “What film?” asked the usher, all wide-eyed innocence. “I don’t know about any film. These people are here for the Hill Valley Spring Fair.” By this time a Google search had yielded the answer: as the duck-rabbit really should have known, Hill Valley is the fictional California town where Back to the Future is set. By this time, we were in the thick of a crowd of bobby-soxers. A California highway patrol officer was doing her best to keep everyone in line.

Now the duck-rabbit found itself wishing, rather wistfully, that it had been invited to the party. The duck-rabbit could have been experiencing not one but two of its very favorite things—a) getting dressed up in a pretty dress and b) Back to the Future—at the same time.

Does everyone of my generation have this inexplicable fondness for Back to the Future? Here’s how deep my affection for this film runs.

Exhibit A. In my second or third year of secondary school, one of our assignments in English was to write a novel. This was a project that we worked on for a couple of months, as I remember, turning in a chapter per week. Now, obviously, the expectation was not that we would write a full-length novel. And, obviously, the duck-rabbit did in fact write a full-length novel about a girl who discovered a rocking-chair that could take her back in time to the 1950s. It was probably a hundred-and-fifty or so handwritten A4 pages, and each chapter had its own illustration. I don’t know where it is now (probably deep at the bottom of a cardboard box in our laundry room). But if it did get thrown away, trust me, it’s no great loss to the world of letters. While my doting English teacher rhapsodized over it (although, frankly, I think he was most impressed by the story’s sheer length and by my unflagging, dogged commitment to the project), from what I can recall of the story, it was pretty dodgy. And totally derivative. One example will suffice to tell you all you need to know.

After my friend Tamsin read the story she gave me her assessment. “I quite liked it,” she said, in the English way that means, “I only somewhat liked it.” There was more. “You know that bit where that guy from the 1950s can’t believe that Ronald Reagan is president in the present day?” She paused. “That is totally ripped off from Back to the Future.” I remember feeling indignant because I was sure that I had come up with that not-particularly-funny joke all by myself. What I now realize is that that film had permeated my consciousness so thoroughly that I had lost all ability to distinguish between its fictional world and the one I had created.

Exhibit B. Not only did I write a novel that was essentially a re-hash of Back to the Future, I also bought the Huey Lewis and the News album that had the “Power of Love” on it, a purchase which I made extremely furtively because, given that my peers had sophisticated musical tastes that reflected the record-collections (and, in some cases, the musical careers) of their bohemian parents, I was fully aware of how poorly this purchase reflected on my musical judgment.

Exhibit C. There is an entirely gratuitous Back to the Future reference in my book. The duck-rabbit will sign a copy (remember: no hands, so this is quite the party trick) for the first eagle-eyed reader to spot it.[1]

Thus concludes my review of the evidence attesting to my enduring affection for this film. To the duck-rabbit’s delight, when it tentatively suggested, as we stood, still dazedly watching the crowds of Secret-Cinema-goers milling around us, that perhaps, possibly, we might hold our own Back to the Future viewing night, enthusiastic squeals emanated from the adults (while perplexed enquiries of “What’s Back to the Future, Mom?” emanated from the flopsy-duckits.) The screening would be at the duck-rabbit’s London residence, which has a big-ass TV. Costume would be optional (though clothing of some sort would be mandatory).[2] We’d make popcorn! And ice-cream sundaes! And something for the vegans that they had in the 50s like, uh, carrot sticks!

You might think that with anticipations of pleasure ratcheted so high, the experience was bound to disappoint. But, on the contrary, it was everything that I had remembered. Michael J. Fox was his darling, baby-mouse 24 year-old self and even more palpably cute now that the duck-rabbit is itself more wizened. In my view, Fox, in this film, inhabits the intersection of the Venn diagram in which the British and American usages of the word “cute” overlap. You see, in Britain, in my day, at least, the adjective “cute” was reserved, fairly exclusively, for baby humans, baby animals, and stuffed toys. I found it very strange to hear Americans, in movies and on television (and, later, in real life), describing other adults as “cute.” To apply “cute” to an adult was puzzling and even creepy, because it meant that you were likening someone you regarded as fanciable to a chick or an Easter bunny.[3]

The exception, however, was Michael J. Fox, who really was cute, like an injured baby bird or helpless baby mouse; this is precisely the appeal that the scene in which Marty is hit, in 1955, by his grandfather’s car depends upon; Marty’s mother falls in love with him because he is cute like a baby animal, and the creepiness of the maternal-erotic feelings she has towards him is precisely the joke.

As you’ll doubtless recall, the movie’s climax occurs when Doc and Marty have to jerry-rig a contraption that will enable them to conduct the lightning that is due to strike the clock tower at precisely 10:04 pm so that it will produce an electrical charge of 1.21 gigawatts (soft g, please) sufficient to power the flux capacitor. Are you still with me?[4]

Crucial to the experience of viewing this particular scene in the particular kitchen in which we were huddled is the fact that the room contained not only the aforementioned big-ass TV upon which we were watching the movie, but also had a big-ass clock.

Now, this is some clock. It’s a very large digital mounted wall clock with red LEDs on a black background like an old-school digital alarm clock. It reminds me of two things simultaneously: the artist Jenny Holzer’s LED signs, where a cryptic “truism” like “money creates taste” loops endlessly, and that timer in Lost down in the hatch that poor old Desmond has to prevent from counting down to zero by punching that code into the Apple II—remember? Also, the kitchen is in the basement, literally under the side-walk, so it has a hatch-like feel to it. And that kitchen clock, showing the seconds flash by, inevitably instills a Lost-like sense of paranoid urgency.

Imagine, for a moment, what it was like indexing hunkered down in that kitchen. I would play games with myself like, “I have to finish the Ds before 12:00 or else those digits will turn to hieroglyphics and doom will be mine.” And then the clock would be flashing 11:59:55, 56, 57, 58, 59, and I would still be on bloody disenchantment and I’d be shouting at no-one in particular, “for God’s sake, indexing is not a task that can be performed to the second!” The effect of the giant alarm clock while indexing was as though someone were jumping up and down yelling, “COME ON, ONLY 5 SECONDS LEFT!” when you were trying to painstakingly build a house of cards. Indexing is just not really a speed sport.

Anyway, I have, I’m afraid, digressed. The point of telling you about the clock is that our happy band of viewers noticed that just when Marty says goodbye to George and Lorraine and the film cuts to a shot of the clock tower with the time showing as five to ten, it was also 9:55 pm on the kitchen digital clock. The duck-rabbit got terribly excited about this parallel as the clock tower and the kitchen clock remained in sync as we approached the fateful minute when lightning was due to strike. As Marty, hitting 88mph, closes his eyes and the film cuts to the clock-tower minute hand shifting to 10:04, the duck-rabbit could be heard yelling, “It’s 10:04pm on our clock too! Is anyone else taking this in??? This is so cool!” as some of the others shot it slightly exasperated looks that said: Yes, we get it. It’s 10:04pm. It’s a coincidence. Your loud and excitable commentary is ruining the moment.

But the duck-rabbit maintains that its excitable commentary in fact produced an enhanced, “heavier,” if you will, film-viewing experience. Yeah, it was heavy all right.

Come on, you can admit it: don’t you wish you were watching Back to the Future with the duck-rabbit right now? Surely, there’s isn’t something else you can think of that you would rather be doing? Never fear; it’ll happen one day. Trust me. I’m a doctor. Also: I can see the future. And I am your density.

[1] Now when the duck-rabbit says “sign a copy,” it means, it wants to be perfectly clear, a copy previously purchased by a reader. No, it doesn’t count if you steal a copy from the library (although; I do sympathize with this urge.)

[2] To my regret I didn’t have time to procure a dress with a cinched waist and a poodle skirt although I would have done, if I’d had the chance, since, the duck-rabbit, blessed as it is with an ample sufficiency of chest and hip (breast of duck and haunch of rabbit), wears that style very well.

[3] Or maybe my discomfort with the word cute isn’t a British thing. Maybe this is just a being-my-mother’s-daughter thing. I vividly recall a moment of misunderstanding between my mother and my American father-in-law that hinged on the usage of the word “cute.” As I remember, either my father- or mother-in-law had pronounced something or someone to be “cute,” and my Mum had flinched.

“Cute!” she repeated, her nose wrinkling. Would you really say that that’s cute?

“Sure,” my mother-in-law replied. “Why not? I mean,” she went on, “lots of things can be cute. People can be cute.”

“Can they?” queried my mother, frowning.

“Sure,” replied my mother-in-law. She paused. “R—– [My father-in-law] is cute!”

At this my mother involuntarily pulled a face that that was kind of a grimace, which my father-in-law saw. Coming to the rescue, or so he thought, he ventured,

“Well, your daughter [referring to the duck-rabbit] is certainly cute!”

The poor man. The following was not what he expected to hear:

“Cute!” My mother exclaimed, now looking truly horrified. “I’m sure I’ve never heard anyone describe my daughter as ‘cute’ before!”

As you read this, you have to strain to hear the very particular tone of distaste with which my Mum uttered the word “cute” here; as though she were gingerly picking up a slightly wet furball that the cat had just hacked up.

But my father-in-law was appalled by what he took to be my mother’s casual denigration of her daughter’s appearance.

“You’ve never heard your daughter called cute before?” he repeated slowly.

He looked back and forth at mother and daughter, his expression, shifting between genuine shock and pity.

But the duck-rabbit understood perfectly well what its mother meant, and was not in the least offended. The duck-rabbit’s mother tried to clarify by saying, “pretty, of course, but not, not cute.” But this failed to clarify anything for my father-in-law and he went on regarding me with the pitying expression that he might have given poor Cinderella being verbally abused by her wicked stepmother.

[4] For the record, I did not have to look up any of those details on Wikipedia. They are just there, in my brain, taking up valuable space where the argument of The Wealth of Nations could be instead.

Dear Readers,

The duck-rabbit’s younger brother, sister-in-law, and adorable 5-month old niece (hereafter: the peanut, which is what everyone calls her) have been temporarily staying with the duck-rabbit’s mother, who lives approximately two minutes walk from the duck-rabbit’s London residence. Since it is rare for us all to be living within almost literal stone’s throw of each other, we’ve been taking full advantage of the proximity. A case in point was last week, on the morning of the duck-rabbit’s brother’s 36^th birthday, when all convened at the duck-rabbit’s house for a celebratory family breakfast at 8:00 am.

The duck-rabbit had awoken, bleary-eyed, around 7:15, and stumbled downstairs to discover that He-Who-Must-Be-Preserved had 1) made bread, which was rising on the counter top, 2) gone running on Hampstead Heath, and 3) gone shopping to buy provisions for a Celebratory Vegan Repast. For, you see, the duck-rabbit’s younger brother has recently “joined the happy band of vegans” as our mother was heard drily observing to another family member. We were determined to Rise To The Occasion.

In addition to He-Who-Must-Be-Preserved’s freshly-baked rustic bread, the breakfast was to include sloe compote (made from sloes foraged by He-Who-Must-Be-Preserved from the Heath, natch); grilled mushrooms; sautéed spinach; and fresh English strawberries. The duck-rabbit’s main contribution was to make coffee and set the table. Both were just slightly botched, the coffee so strong that the menfolk had to be called upon to depress the plunger into the French press, and the table’s overall aesthetic effect sullied by the duck-rabbit’s insistence on setting out both butter and milk, which the duck-rabbit’s mother made a point of moving out of frame before taking a snap of the feast, which surely could have graced the subtly matt-yet-glowing-with-virtue cover of Smug Vegan Weekly: Locavore Edition.

Before going any further it should be clarified that references in this dispatch to the duck-rabbit’s London residence refer to the house in Highgate that the duck-rabbit is lucky enough to stay in for free during the latter half of August when her generous friend (whom the duck-rabbit has known since they met as students at the London School of Classical Dance in the mid-80s) who actually lives in said residence is in the South of France. Highgate is not a neighborhood the duck-rabbit could afford to live in. Kate Moss lives across the street, for Gawd’s sake.

At least that’s what the duck-rabbit’s mother claims. (“Oh yes, she lives in Coleridge’s old house,” explained the duck-rabbit’s mother over breakfast. She paused and glanced at the duck-rabbit. You know, Coleridge. The poet,” she added, helpfully. The duck-rabbit found this clarification a little galling. “Yes. I believe I’ve heard of Coleridge,” it found itself saying. Lest you think the duck-rabbit was being a tad prickly here, the duck-rabbit’s brother backed it up, observing caustically that it was interesting that, of the nine people seated around the table that morning, the duck-rabbit’s mother chose to address this clarification (“You know … the poet,”) to the only person at the table who actually reads and teaches Coleridge’s poetry on a regular basis. “That was just where my eyes happened to land!” protested the duck-rabbit’s mother, all innocence.)

This exchange added a welcome piquancy to our vegan breakfast and we all (flopsy-duckits excepted) continued to happily eat our greens and mushrooms. In lieu of presents, rash promises were made, and the duck-rabbit’s brother was presented with a crown that the elder flopsy duckit had woven from willow stalks twisted with ivy at a summer fair in Queen’s Wood. As an extra touch the elder flopsy duckit had added a fake white carnation which looped rather wildly out from the crown at a rakish angle. Wearing his crown while eating his mushrooms and holding the peanut, my brother looked like a right North London Oberon.

Being vegan’s not all organic spinach and strawberries though. No, as far as the duck-rabbit can glean from its brother’s example, the workaday vegan diet involves an awful lot of peanut butter on toast.* This was especially clear on a morning a few days before the birthday breakfast, when the duck-rabbit, having just barely stumbled into the kitchen for breakfast, heard her phone ringing—unusual before 8 am. It was the duck-rabbit’s brother. The conversation was brief and yet, as siblings, we could convey so much with so few words:

D-R’s brother: (The following uttered in a let’s-just-dispense-with-niceties tone that conveyed the speaker had been ransacking the kitchen, searching, fruitlessly, for at least fifteen minutes) What did you do with the peanut butter?

D-R: (Innocently) I took it, didn’t I?

D-R’s brother: You took it? (These words uttered in a tone that communicated, “who the fuck goes into someone else’s house and takes their peanut butter?”)

D-R: Yeah, ‘cos Mum bought it for me, right?

D-R’s brother: Umm, well, I think she bought if for the house rather than for one specific person.**

D-R: (Not betraying for one millisecond even a shred of doubt that it is in the right) No, she definitely bought it for me. Because I had accidentally left some peanut butter over there. (Micro-pause in which Duck-Rabbit decides that this somewhat mysterious turn of events does not require additional clarification) And then you all (Mild accusatory tone) finished it, so Mum decided to replace my jar of peanut butter. I’m looking at it right now. (Jovially) So you know where it is if you want it! (By this the Duck-Rabbit means, as its brother full well understands, “I. Am Not. Bringing. It. Back.”)

D-R’s brother: (Pause) Right then. (Translation: “Why do you hate vegans? Why must you deprive us of one of our only sources of protein?” Assumes faux-jovial tone) Well, I guess I’ll stop looking for the peanut butter then!

D-R: All right. Glad to be of help!

Now, for the record, the duck-rabbit does not hate vegans. And, quite honestly, the vegan breakfast was not at all bad (would it have been enhanced by bacon and eggs? Obviously. But we won’t dwell on that.) Satisfying too was the South Indian vegetarian lunch we had later that day at Diwana, the beloved bhel-poori house on Drummond Street. But by dinner, the whole family was practically foaming at the mouth when we entered the duck-rabbit’s mother’s house, which was perfumed with the scent of roasting chicken smothered with bacon, and sausages (the duck-rabbit’s brother and sister-in-law were going out that night so we were cramming in the meat). Later, after the dishes had been cleared, the duck-rabbit found itself standing at the stove, scraping caramelized chicken fat from the roasting pan and shoveling it into its mouth. “Oh. My. God. I don’t think I can stop eating this,” the duck-rabbit confessed to its mother, who looked on, at once fascinated and faintly repulsed.

Here we encounter an interesting peculiarity in the duck-rabbit’s biology: two brains; two mouths; one digestive system. Now, the rabbit is firmly committed to a healthful, plant-based diet. The rabbit has read its Peter Singer and its Jonathan Safran Foer. The rabbit has seen the light. The rabbit is convinced. The rabbit genuinely enjoys eating quinoa, brown rice cakes, and dried nori. The rabbit could (and sometimes does) eat kale salad five days a week for lunch. The rabbit swears it has a fantastic recipe for vegan chocolate cupcakes.

The duck, on the other hand … the duck is another story. The duck is the one who scrapes those miraculous sticky bits of brown chickeny goodness from the roasting pan.*** The duck steals the flopsy-duckits’ crisps when they’re not looking. The duck believes passionately that sorbet is a sick joke perpetrated by people committed to ruining dessert for the rest of us. The duck is never going to order some namby-pamby concoction like grapefruit-basil sorbet when there is chocolate ice cream available. The duck says if it wants something refreshing, it’ll have a glass of water, thank you very much.

The duck is also the one who bought, earlier today, a beautiful grey python skin belt from the second-hand store in Highgate Village. The rabbit strongly objected. The duck countered that it’s second-hand-python and so, like, doubly already dead. Right? The rabbit was unconvinced but the duck had the credit card and appealed to the rabbit’s vanity by saying it looked really thin in it and … well, these things happen, don’t they, readers?

I hope you all had a good weekend.

Yours very truly,

Your very own furry, webfooted,

Rabid-Duckwit

Notes

* I want to make it crystal clear here that “peanut butter” here refers to the substance made from crushed groundnuts. I’m only going to say this once: my brother does not spread his baby on toast. That would be abhorrent. (Also: totally not vegan.) Also, I have to say that I’m a bit shocked that it even crossed your mind for a second that that was what I meant. What kind of nightmarish Swiftian alternative universe do you imagine that I inhabit? Also—and I’ve wrestled with whether I should say anything about this but my conscience has gotten the better of me: I think it’s a little bit racist of you to even think it. Now, calm down. I know being racist doesn’t fit with your self-image. But let’s examine the evidence: you just leapt to the conclusion that my kind are cannibals. Now, I can’t hear you when you’re spluttering and stuttering like that. It’s not racist of you because you thought I was white, you say? (Shakes head and sighs) Oh dearie, dearie me. I gotta say: you’re just digging yourself in deeper here. It’s astonishing, isn’t it, the seething racism that underlies liberalism’s benign exterior? But as long as you can admit you have a problem I think we can get past this. I’m magnanimous like that. None of us are perfect. You’re racist and I’m …. I’m …. well, I can be a bit of a perfectionist sometimes, can’t I? Yes, that’s my flaw.

** Implicit here following the phrase “the house,” was the unspoken relative clause “that I live in,” and, likewise, implicit following the phrase “one specific person” was the unspoken relative clause “that doesn’t live in this house.”

*** What’s that you say? Fowl eating fowl surely is a form of cannibalism? (Pause) You’ve got me there! Guilty as charged, your honour!

A is for alienation and art;

B is for Baumgarten, Beattie, and Barthes.

C is for Carroll (Noël not Lewis),

D is for disbelief (God, get me through this!)

E is for Empson, engrossment, enchantment,

Estrangement effects and also entrancement.

F is for fantasy, feeling and Feynman,

G is for Gottsched (nicht ein Kleiner Mann).*

H is for hoaxing, hoodwinking, Hume;

I is for Indexing, please be done soon.

J is for Johnson (Claudia and Sam),

K is for Kant, whom I can’t understand.

L is for Leibniz;

M is for memes;

N is for nothing is all that it seems.

O is for odd;

P is for plot;

Q is for something but what, I’ve forgot.

R is for reading, Ricoeur and Richetti,

S is for Socrates, Sterne and Spaghetti.

(Actually, I lie, there are really no noodles;

But narrative strands? Of those, there are oodles.)

T is for Taste and my darling Tom Jones;

U is for U guys, don’t leave me alone!

V is for vulgar, virtual and viral;

W is wonder, the heart of this spiral.

It’s complex, you see, it’s both marvel and doubt;

But X, X is just what you think it’s about.

Y is for why oh why oh why;

Z is for Žižek: my hero! No lie.

* In his autobiography, Goethe describes Gottsched as “that tall, broad, gigantic man.” (See The Auto-biography of Goethe: Truth and Poetry: From My Own Life Vol. 1 trans. John Oxenford (Cambridge; first published 1848, reprinted 2013), p.226.)

A few days ago the duck-rabbit received the typeset final proofs of its book manuscript, along with instructions to give final approval to text and index “at its earliest convenience.” Since then, duck and rabbit have been locked in a desperate struggle for ascendency. Rabbit, the perfectionist, insists that every page reference listed in the index must be checked. Duck has all sorts of vaguely plausible-sounding reasons for why doing so is a complete waste of time.

At the start of the following exchange, Rabbit hunches over her laptop, determinedly gazing at two open PDF files of the final proofs, the one on the right-hand side open to the index. She peers at the right-hand file and then pauses, staring into space mouthing numbers to herself before typing a page number into the search box in the top of the file of the left-hand file and pressing return decisively. She scans the page, then looks back to the right-hand file and the cycle begins again. While Rabbit repeats this cycle Duck idly skims a copy of Horrible Histories: Gorgeous Georgians while also tapping away on his iPhone. He chuckles every few minutes, sometimes while looking at the phone, sometimes while looking at the book. He also glances up every now and again to check Rabbit’s progress.

DUCK: So where are you up to now then?

RABBIT: You realize you asked me that less than five minutes ago?

DUCK: (Ignoring rabbit) So you must be up to, I dunno, “F” by now or something?

(Pause.)

DUCK: Rabbit?

RABBIT: [Scowling]: I’m up to “Addison, Joseph”, all right?

DUCK: [Genuinely mystified]: Addison? a-d??? Are you serious? You’ve been doing this for two days. How can you still be on the As?

RABBIT: Oh, I don’t know. Perhaps because someone keeps interrupting me.

DUCK: Hey, don’t blame me, I’m just shouting encouragement from the sidelines.

RABBIT: (Acerbically) Ahh, so that’s what you’re doing.

DUCK: Yeah, and I think that by now, at the least, at the very least, you should be up to “Austen, Jane”.

RABBIT: Look, I’m trying to be thorough here.

DUCK: Why?

RABBIT: Why? What do you mean why?

DUCK: I’m serious. Why are you bothering?

[Spluttering from Rabbit. Duck continues unperturbed.]

I mean, how many people are actually going to buy this book? Let’s see … there’s Mum … no, wait, don’t you get, like, five free copies or something? Surely, the poor woman who birthed us gets one of those. Umm, let’s see. Who else. (Long pause) I dunno. (Genuinely curious) Do you think anyone will buy it?

RABBIT: (Indignantly) I’ll have you know that I was recently told that in response to a 30% online discount, advance copies of the book have “seen great uptake.”

DUCK: (Unimpressed.) First of all, I don’t want to worry you, but I don’t think it’s a good sign that they are discounting it before it’s even been released. Does that show confidence in the product? No. No, it doesn’t. Second of all, I suspect some of those buyers are ordering it in error.

RABBIT: (Perplexed) What do you mean?

DUCK: Well, it’s called “rediscovering awe,” or something, right? They probably think it’s some kind of spiritual guide, which means they’ll be returning it when they realize that it contains no guidance at all for living more awesomely but that it’s actually about the history of an obsolete literary genre with no relevance to today’s world. So, then, the real question is, of the three people who actually keep the book, how many are even going to look at the index?

RABBIT: Duck, do you actually know what the word “encouragement” means? Also, I look at indexes all the time.

DUCK: Right, but I’m talking about real people, not imaginary rabbits. What are real people going to read? Maybe they’ll read the acknowledgements, maybe the handy chapter summary at the end of the intro, maybe they’ll look at the pictures. And, let’s be honest, that’s it.

RABBIT: And your point is …?

DUCK: My point is that if there are a few errors, who’s gonna know the difference?

RABBIT: (Despondent) Do you know how long I’ve been working on this book?

DUCK: (Chuckling, jovial): Well, it certainly feels like forever.

RABBIT: (Has never looked more sober) It does, doesn’t it?

(Pause.)

Well, let’s see, it’s just you and me, I can be honest. I started my PhD in 1996, which means I finished my coursework in 1998, probably took my field exams in 1999, wrote my prospectus in 2000, which is probably when I started writing. So what year is it now then?

DUCK: (In barely audible whisper) 2014.

RABBIT: Dear God. I’ve been writing this book for fourteen years. (Pause.) No-one takes fourteen years to write a book. Do you know anyone else who’s taken fourteen years to write a book?

(Duck hastily taps at his phone. Long pause.)

DUCK: Hmmm.

RABBIT: I knew it. No-one has taken this long to write a book in the entire, in the entire history of book-writing.

DUCK: No. Wait. Hold your horses. I’m still looking ….

(Triumphantly.) J.R.R. TOLKIEN! Lord of the Rings! See? You’re in good company!

RABBIT: (Muttering) If faux medieval romance is your thing. I mean, I’ve always said, just read Malory if that’s your bag …

DUCK: (Laughing in disbelief) Wait. Let me get this straight. You’re saying that you think your book is better than Lord of the Rings?

RABBIT: That’s not what I’m saying. Not exactly. But anyway, it took him fourteen years eh? And everyone knows that writing stories is so much bloody easier than writing literary criticism.

DUCK: (Still looking at phone) Oh.

RABBIT: What?

DUCK: Well, actually, it was fourteen years to write The Hobbit plus The Lord of the Rings. (Pause) Also, The Lord of the Rings is technically three books. So really he wrote four books in fourteen years. (Calculating in his head) So that’s actually about a book every three and a half years. That’s actually a pretty good clip right there. (Sees Rabbit’s stricken face) Oh. Sorry.

(Pause.)

Also, it says here that he could only type with two fingers.

RABBIT: You know, you’re actually not helping. Although, if you’re going to bring manual dexterity into the equation, I’ve typed a whole book without hands. How do you explain that?

DUCK: Well, if it comes to that, I’ve been Googling on my iPhone and I don’t have hands either. And, no, I didn’t use Siri or some special voice recognition software. How do you explain that?

(There is an awkward pause.)

RABBIT: I think we’re getting off track here.

DUCK: You’re right. Let’s stop quibbling over trivial facts and figures. Here’s what I really wanted to say (Gestures towards his Horrible Histories volume): this book is so awesome. I mean, this is the way to make the eighteenth century come alive for people today.

RABBIT: You understand that those are intended for kids?

DUCK: (Ignoring Rabbit) Look, here are three lessons you can learn from this book for your next book. 1) You need cartoons, lots of them. No one reads any more. Reading is, quite literally, history.

RABBIT: (To himself) What does that even mean?

DUCK: (Continuing to ignore Rabbit) It’s all about the visuals. 2) You need lots of grizzly details. People love anything grotesque. Let’s see, let me find a good example. OK, here’s one: (reads from book) “In Cambridge in 1770, a 16-year-old boy ‘ate a whole cat smothered with onions’.” See? That’s gold, pure gold.

RABBIT: Sure, whatever you say. And the third lesson?

DUCK: Humor, you need humor. Ooh, here’s a good bit: “…But in the reign of George III those American Colonists started to get stroppy. They weren’t happy with being told what to do by a king and a parliament back in Britain. They wanted to make their own decisions – they wanted to be free to kill Native Americans and steal their land, free to invent hamburgers and free to play cowboys.” You see what he did there? Threw in a bit of satire.

RABBIT: Really, you think putting in a joke about stroppy Patriots is going to get me tenure? In America?

DUCK: Yeah, it’s a bit irreverent, you know? I tell you, there is nothing Americans love more than an uppity Brit. If history’s taught us anything, it’s that, isn’t it?

RABBIT: (Doubtfully) Is it?

DUCK: Trust me, they love it. (Pauses. Reconsiders) Actually, you might be right. You might not be able to pull it off. It’s all in the tone. Never mind. Forget the humor. Maybe you’re right. Just go with thoroughness. That can be your “thing.” Thoroughness. (Pause) You know, you should really get back to that index. It’s not going to check itself.*

*For the record, I have finished the Ds, ladies and gentlemen.† Tomorrow I will be continuing apace with “enchantment.”

†As its prize for finishing today’s quota, He-Who-Must-Be-Preserved bought the duck-rabbit a Belgian chocolate brownie from the Pain Quotidien in Highgate Village. The duck-rabbit also saw fit to make itself a gin and tonic at its mother’s house. “You know what they say about gin, don’t you?” the duck-rabbit’s Mum asked the elder flopsy-duckit, as the duck-rabbit settled down to enjoy its drink. “No, what?” he asked, innocently. “Mother’s Ruin,” said the duck-rabbit’s Mum, darkly.