I’m back in the park with the cool kids. Actually I think it’s a different group of cool kids this week, with better taste in music and an understanding of the concept of volume control.
The buttercups are out. The green grass is swathed in bright gold. Seas of flowers stretch down the hill and round the corner out of sight. It’s really sweet.
I reckon butter was a brighter yellow back in the old days when they got their name. Cows ate proper grass I suppose. These flowers, at least, the ones closest to me here by the bench, are a rich yellow ochre, almost an orange. The butter in my fridge is white by comparison. But colours have never been my strong point.
They’re definitely cups though. I thought about holding one under my chin to find out whether I like butter (as the old saying goes) but three immediate things occurred to me: you can’t see under your own chin, I have a beard anyway, and I already know I do like it, because I’m me.
But wait a mo. Even if that were a true thing, surely the ‘buttercup test’ was only ever useful for people who had an important reason to hide their butter-liking-preferences from you (I don’t know, something to do with floral espionage, I bet Agatha Christie worked it into a Miss Marple or something) yet you still somehow had managed to tie them down and wave petals under their face against their will, or a completely mute person suffering from a bout of amnesia while contemplating eating one of two differently made sandwiches on a picnic.
These really are the cool kids. They’re listening to Whitney Houston’s I Wanna Dance with Somebody, circa 1987. They’re talking about their upcoming prom - which seems to be a sort of political method for figuring out who likes whom, and who therefore shall dance with whom, before they all finish their exams and (dramatically) never see each other again.
It was easier in the old days I reckon. You just worked out whether you both liked butter.
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