
The parents don't object. Accordingly we have lots of ducks around the house.
We have ducks in the living-room.
These came from the Czech Republic. Two of them are actually salt and pepper pots.
We have ducks in the kitchen.
These came from Birmingham; specifically a reduced-price housewares store in the Pallisades shopping centre immediately above Birmingham New Street station.
We have ducks in the bathroom.
The plastic ducks are quite old. Incidentally, the rest of the bathroom is a lot cleaner and less dusty. The ducks are at the opposite end of the bath to the shower-head, you see.
We have ducks in the spare bedroom.
I used to sleep here, but have changed room since. Most of these ducks are about fifteen years old.
We have ducks in my bedroom, too.
Lastly, there's even a duck in my bed.
Dreamy Duck, above, is actually a hot-water-bottle cover from Christmas 1989. He's perpetually very cheerful-looking. We are rapidly approaching hot water bottle winter weather.
However, there has been a recent addition to the kitchen collection:
Is it a bird? (Don't answer that.) Is it a plane? No, it's... potato-duck!
Have a closer look:
kawaii, desu ne Spuddy fits right in with the rest of them.
I admit this is a gratuitously elaborate set-up for what is essentially "We found a funny-shaped potato" on what has been a very boring, wet Wednesday, but it amused the heck out of me when I saw it for the first time and this seems like as good a way to memorialise it as any. After all, the potato will end up in the compost heap slightly before it starts to go rotten, but the picture will remain amusing forever.
Out of curiosity, can any non-Japanese speakers intuit the meaning of kawaii, desu ne from context? It doesn't count if you already know or if you have to Google, but it's a phrase which might come up from Japanese media fandom from time to time and somehow seems to fit much better than the English language equivalent. Not sure if I'll go back to studying Japanese (the more I find out about Japanese daily life, the more I want to absorb some parts of the culture from afar rather than ever visiting it for real - which would seem to negate part of the reason for studying the language) but this is one of my favourite Japanese phrases.