The Writers' Circle

Tony Dawson had always been a keen fisherman.
Before his freak accident with the box of oranges and the grand piano that had left him with no sense of patience, he had spent most of his time quietly fishing at his local lake.
After he had been released from hospital, he had resumed his favourite pastime. He would go down to the lake and set up his rod, and sit on his folding chair, and wait for the fish to bite. After five minutes he would be drumming his fingers on his tackle box, and after ten minutes if he had not caught a fish, he would leap into the lake and try to catch one with his bare hands.
Two or three times a day, his wife would arrive carrying a set of spare clothes for him. She would tuck her dress into her knickers and wade into the water, grab her husband by the neck and drag him back to dry land.

The aquatic thrashing about of a deranged fisherman sent all of the ducks to the far side of the lake. This was bad news for young mothers and small children, as they could no longer feed the ducks without walking on the grass that surrounded the lake, and it made their shoes dirty. So the council built a new pathway to the far side of the lake in order to reunite excitable children, bored women and hungry ducks.

Paths cost a lot of money, and the council was keen to recoup its outlay. Some-one suggested that if the council opened a small shop that sold bread for the ducks at the far side of the lake, the profit generated from it would pay for the cost of the path. A few weeks later, the newly built stale bread shop opened. It was an inspired idea. Young mothers no longer had to find room in their bags to carry stale bread to the lake. The children had an abundance of out of date bakery items to throw at the ducks, and the council was making money from its shop.

No-one had realised when the shop was being built, that there was a small glitch in the plan.
At the end of October, without notifying the council, all of the ducks launched themselves into the air and flew south for the winter.
No ducks meant no children, and no children meant no bread sales. Faced with impending financial ruin the council took radical action.
A box of rubber ducks were purchased from the local bathroom supplies warehouse. They were painted in duck colours, attached to sticks and planted in the lake close enough to the shop to encourage bread sales, but far enough into the lake to discourage close inspection.
The children returned and crusty bread rolls and wholemeal loaves were once again being hurled into the water by the children while the mothers stood and watched Mrs Dawson wrestle her husband out of the other side of the lake.
So important was the revenue from the stale bread shop that when the water level dropped during a winter drought and exposed the sticks that were anchoring the ducks to the bed of the lake, the council painted the ducks pink and erected a sign saying "Please feed the flamingos"

With an abundance of bread floating about in the water and a lack of genuine wildfowl to eat the stuff, the fish in the lake gorged themselves. The more they ate, the fatter and lazier they became. This was good news for the Dawson family. Mr. Dawson could now catch a fish simply by walking to the edge of the lake, selecting which fish he wanted and hitting it with a stout stick.

When the ducks returned in the springtime they avoided the area with the miniature pink flamingos, and as Mr Dawson was no longer thrashing about in the near side of the lake they settled back in their original place. 
People no longer had to walk all the way across to the far side to feed the ducks any-more and so didn't bother going to the shop.

The council wondered how much it would cost to move the shop to the other side of the lake.