Quack!

Ismay commented:

That is awesomely cute! And yet, they do look like a multi-headed duckling monster too. Duckling hydra? :) 

 And she's (I assume she's a she?) quite right!  It's like some kind of feathery quilt sprouting stripey heads and beaks...

I had a very vivid dream last night, in which my next-door-office-colleague (a rather sensible and unimaginative person outside of their particular research field) and I were drawing up a list identifying our colleagues as ducks (paddling like mad to keep the department and its teaching going), zombies (persons not just not helping but actively hindering those efforts - I assume that might be some kind of subconcious feed through from having recently read Cherie Priest's three steampunk novels in which volcanic gases lead to zombie-ism, because zombies do not appeal to or particularly appear in my mental stock of archetype-type-imagery) and Alien X's (whose motives and actions were inscrutable but mainly worked out beneficially).  Then we both had a lively chat with a senior colleague who we'd assigned as Alien X and were having trouble persuading him that it wasn't an insult and that he'd earned the right to be inscrutable. 

I assume my sub-conscious was processing some things from the meeting yesterday morning... it was quite unusual for a work dream because I wasn't upset or distressed during it or by it, it just felt like we were doing a necessary task.  It definitely felt necessary to know who belonged in each category.  I woke up this morning confident that I was a duck!  Which is an odd sort of thought really.

It reminds me of the apocryphal story of examination stress overcoming a candidate at AncientInternationallyRenownedUniversity.  The candidate is supposed to have suddenly stood up in the middle of an exam, and pronounced: "I'm an orange! I'm an orange!  And I just realised that oranges don't do exams!" and ran out of the hall.  Ducks don't actually have to teach, grade, prepare for the REF, deal with group members' many vaguaries and student crises and bureaucratic stuff and collegues, even though in my dream they were the category metaphor for people who did all those things, so maybe I was just envying the freedom to lie around in the ivy with family?