Yesterday was my niece’s birthday, so I joined my parents in a town close to Geneva* and we paid a visit to my sister’s place. Unfortunately, the gifts that I had bought my niece the previous day at the archaeological museum of Neuchâtel were not really to her liking. As an ex-teacher of history, I had thought that the box of playcards to learn expressions in French derived from Greek mythology and the replica of a Celtic bracelet I had purchased at the gift shop of Laténium would make some nice presents with an educational slant. The problem as regards the mythological phrase playcards was that I had not been able to read the instructions beforehand as they were in the box and I was thus unable to convince my niece of the validity of the endeavour in the crucial first minutes after she had opened the box, even though she seems to be a little of the bookish type. Neither did the bracelet with a replica gemstone in a colour quite close to pink (which used to be her favourite colour) pass the test, really. This is because her favourite colours are now pale green and ‘apple’ green.
Somehow I cannot but help associate these colours with the doodle I had seen two days earlier on a famous search engine to mark the ‘start of the asparagus season 2015’.
Field of aspargus, Sugiez (Fribourg), 16 April 2015
As an aside, I saw a field with some asparagus on Thursday.
Wheat grass and lentils, grown in our kitchen – 15 April 2015
I also associate my niece’s new favourite colours with some of the new sorts of micro-greens my wife started to grow only three weeks ago, i.e. after I had retrieved a book on this subject from the ‘food bookshelf’ of my personal library and asked her whether she would be interested in seeing how difficult it would be to grow these other types. My wife is an aficionada of edible plants, flowers, greens etc, so she always seems to be interested in such ‘experiments’ and so far she has been quite successful at it.
Store selling health-organic food, Vevey, 12 April 2015
So I am wondering whether or not to buy a germination set for my niece so that she can grow some beautiful greens and thus find out that it can be fun to grow one’s own shoots or vegetables.
Otherwise I guess I shall have to think about a feminine version of a costume of the green man. 😉
By the way, any suggestions for other green gifts would be welcome…
POSTSCRIPT (19 April)
Blended with some orange juice, the lentil shoots were turned into a delicious ‘smoothie’. We still have to find out whether or not it can be described as a genuine ‘green power shot’. 😉
*As background reading to this article (i.e. in connection with Google’s recent asparagus doodle) and serendipity having played a role in this, I came across an article on the hacking of people’s personal computers: surprise, surprise, pc hacking is made easier through the sharing of information (such as personal photos, home email addresses and any other such information that will allow hackers to build up a profile of who we are) over the Internet. This is why I am not going to share any pictures of my niece or of my sister’s place (especially since there was an attempted break-into their place a couple of days ago – burglaries in French-speaking Switzerland are unfortunately extremely common nowadays, a significant number of which are committed by non-locals if I dare write so).