Perhaps blue butterflies are luckier than orange ones

I saw a butterfly on Tuesday morning. An orange one. We were standing on a hotel rooftop, having a break from our training, sharing the poolside with the British and Russian tourists (no, I don’t know their nationalities, I’m assuming), basting themselves with oil and roasting themselves in the sun.

‘Look,’ I said to my newest friend. ‘A butterfly.’

‘We say that when you see a butterfly you’ll have good luck.’

Later that night, I thought my luck might have been that the cord I bought to connect my ithing to the television actually did the job and later that night we would be able to watch an episode of Curb Your Enthusiasm. What luck. But, no, my luck was even better than that. There, in my unchecked emails, an offer from the ABC to broadcast my short story ‘The Plumber’. Well, how nice is that?

But not content with what I had, I had to push my luck one step too far. Loading up the other ithing with the series of The Wire which I have been trying to view on a screen bigger than my thumbnail, we used the cord, the cord which just last night had worked. With the blue plug in the blue hole and the green plug in the green hole, nothing works at all, and with the blue plug in the green hole and the green plug in the blue hole, the picture works, but it’s washed in pink. Most disconcerting.

And that is how we got the saying: Butterfly’s luck.