She loves me, she loves me not
I was looking from the kitchen door this morning, watching the goldfinches on the birdfeeder as they scared off any great tits and blue tits that dared to try and nibble a sunflower seed, when one of the children pointed out the two deer standing just yards away from the door.
I’m not sure how I hadn’t noticed them but it was a lovely thing to see, we all agreed, and stood watching them for a few minutes. Then Mrs B arrived, pushed us aside and charged out of the door making a noise I thought I would only hear on safari in deepest Africa.
Apparently we had all been enjoying the spectacle of flower beds being destroyed, rather than Bambi 2. And whispering how lovely it all looked was the wrong response.
I think the deer were being quite clever. Apparently hunters can’t shoot things within a certain distance of a house, 30 metres I think, so deer can sit on our patio all day, sticking their tongues out at passing troops of hunt dogs and elderly huntsman without any risk to life or limb.
I think Mrs B’s daisies survived the ordeal, we won’t know until the spring, but she will be very upset if she can’t sit in the sunshine playing ‘he loves me, he loves me not’ next year. She has never told me who she is checking up on, funnily enough.
That entertaining game comes from France, by the way, and was traditionally called ‘effuiller le marguerite’ and played with those large oxeye daisies. Much easier for those of us with big clumsy fingers.
In the traditional game the odds were more in favour of being loved, because instead of just ‘ he loves me’ or ‘he loves me not’ (a disappointing 50% possibility of being loved) they had ‘he loves me a bit’, ‘he loves me quite a lot’, ‘he loves me passionately’, ‘he is madly in love with me’ and ‘he loves me not’. So a good 80% chance of at least a bit of affection.
And now I think I understand why Mrs B has bought genetically modified daisies which always have 20 petals…
