If it quacks like a duck...

The late, great Ian Jack sits on the top table of my all-time great writers. I'm indebted to him for this detailed history of a ship that was built in 1930s Nazi Germany and carried German holiday-makers before WWII. In wartime, he explains, it carried battleship supplies, Jews to Auschwitz and German refugees away from the Red Army. It survived bombing by the RAF and mining by the British Navy, before being captured and used as a British troop-carrier by the Ministry of Transport, who called all their ships 'Empire' something, and all their captured German ships after rivers

The ship in question was named after the river in this picture, swollen by the rain, almost overtopping its banks and, not for the first time, flooding the car park where we have just stopped to pick up our Covid jab. It's the river Windrush, which rises in the high Cotswolds, north-east of Cheltenham, and flows south-east to join the Thames near Oxford. By chance, we visited three towns in its valley today

The banal, but beautifully made, point on which Jack's article hinges is that certain names acquire cultural significance way beyond the intention of the person who bestowed the name. 'Windrush' now conjures for us grainy black-and-white images of the bemused faces of beautifully-dressed black families disembarking at Tilbury, into a world of adversity and conflict they could not have imagined

And now the name has risen again, inextricably linked to 'scandal' - a still-seeping boil on the florid, ugly face of our politics - as those same children discover that a lifetime contributing to this land is not enough to insulate them from the craven hostility that lurks in the gloomiest corners of our society, shamefully including the leadership and instruments of our government 

What's in a name? Turkeys don't come from Turkey, Guinea pigs don't come from Guinea (any of them) and Muscovy ducks don't come from Moscow, as Shakespeare didn't say, but an amusing 'facts about Muscovy ducks' website did. This bird seems to be a magnet for Internet listicles, I think because it embodies several 'would you believe it' qualities; I giggled my way down several of them. The 'Muscovy' tag might be smart marketing by domestic poultry dealers, it might be a corruption of 'Muisca' - indigenous people of Columbia, in the region of central and south America where the bird is native (and where it was first domesticated by the locals), or it might be that people think it smells musky

Other highlights: it's definitely a duck, not a goose; it doesn't quack (!), but it does hiss (quietly and non-aggressively - it's definitely not a goose, ok); it perches, and nests, in trees (although not always, and some of the domesticated strains can't fly); the meat tastes more like beef than poultry (and nothing like goose!), but if you see them on a menu or for sale as meat, they are likely to be called 'Barbary duck'

Finally, the lumps on their face are called 'caruncles', and they have a serious purpose - they contain sebaceous glands that secrete the oil that waterproofs their feathers when they preen. A lumpy face is likely to mean a well-groomed duck. Florid they may be, but don't call them ugly ducks