Have you ever noticed how when you change something round a bit, you like to look at it, noticing the difference from before, the newness? It happened to me not long ago. Adèle and I reorganized our books so as to make room on the fiction shelves for new acquisitions. For a few days I kept looking at the changed layout, and thinking 'That looks nice'; whereas the old layout had become familiar enough to me not to be of special interest.
Is this a deep feature of human nature or merely a personal eccentricity? We have a duck out in our garden. Not a real duck, but one made from old oil drums. He's from Zimbabwe and is called Ickworth - sometimes Ickers - because Ickworth is where we got him. After the snowfall he was, like everything else in the garden, hidden under the stuff. So I went out and cleaned him up. Like so...
After that I kept wanting to look out the back window and see how he was doing. And that's why a duck.
