Flower Power

I am quite awed by the power of the flower.

Yesterday I bought some flowers on the way home from work — that's just the type of guy I am. Not an expensive bunch, but one of those impressive-loooking, space-invading, conical shaped, multi-coloured deals.

Up on the platform I noticed it first. This young woman looked at me, glanced down at the flowers and smiled at me. Exactly the same thing from an older woman walking up the platform. What is going on?

I boarded the train, doing my customary stand-in-the-middle-because-I've-only-got-three-stops thing. As anyone who remembers the weather yesterday it was a wet and muggy day, so crowded in the little vestibule of the carriage, the faint bouquet of the flowers became a stifling, cloying stench. But that didn't stop the women smiling at me uninvited. One older, sharply attractive, power-suited woman squashed in the far corner even combined the look, glance, smile with a affectionate tilt of the head. This is probably a woman who is used to physically biting off the heads of people who oppose her in the boardroom.

So what is going on here? All have obviously made the assumption that, inspired by true love, I've bought the flowers in a spur-of-the-moment fit of passion. Don't any of these women make the assumption that the reason I've bought the flowers is in apology because I've totalled her uninsured car whilst in a drunken swerve attempting to hit a small kitten on the road on the way back from the motel with the most hated girl from her childhood sitting barely-dressed in the passenger seat and after borrowing it without telling her? That's certainly a more likely explanation.

On reflection though, I guess I shouldn't take too much stock in the flower power. I got the same look, glance, smile from the thin, clean fit and mustachioed man in the tiny tight running shorts who was standing on the pavement outside the train station at Waverton. Although I have a sneaking suspicion that the glance down was not at the flowers.