About a Boy | Regent's Park Boating Lake — Dead Duck Day

Marcus takes a loaf of his mother's homemade bread to the lake, throws it at a duck, and kills it. The bird goes under. A park attendant comes over, Will lies smoothly on the boy's behalf, and that piece of unearned loyalty is what gets Marcus through the door of Will's flat and keeps him coming back. Nick Hornby's characters remember it afterwards as Dead Duck Day.

The lake is the ornamental water in the south-west of Regent's Park, cut when John Nash laid the park out in the 1820s. In January 1867 the ice broke under a crowd of skaters and about forty people drowned; the lake was afterwards drained and relaid at roughly four feet deep, which is why it now looks so mild. Herons stalk the islands. Pedal boats go out from the boathouse. Coots fight all spring.

Bring bread today and you are breaking the rules twice over. The Royal Parks ask visitors not to feed waterfowl bread at all — it fills them up without feeding them and fouls the water. There are signs saying so within sight of where the scene plays. Marcus's loaf, lethal in the film, would now get him a quiet word before it ever reached the duck.

Photo: Wikimedia Commons.