Do you remember doing this?

It was a simple game to play on a hot summer’s day during the school holidays if you were of the right age. I can remember playing it more than a few times myself mostly as a joke but a few times, it was real and it was a fishing expedition to see if there was any interest.

The game was simply as I said the only prop you needed was a ‘Daisy’. Someone playing the game alternately speaks the phrases "He (or she) loves me”, and "He loves me not”, while picking one petal from a daisy is the official and historic way to play the game. If the last petal is ‘loves me’, your relationship was true love.

We played it somewhat different, for example. If you were with a girl you liked, you would pick a daisy, name a girl (Jokingly of course), and start plucking a petal one by one. Each time saying she loves me she loves me not with the idea the last petal would end, as ‘she loves me’, probably dreading her laughing because if you liked the girl it could be heart breaking.

I had a few tries optimistically testing the water as you do when you are young and stupid. Of course it never worked! Did it ever, not to my knowledge I would be shocked if it had. What normally happened you both burst into laughter? If it were too land on ‘she loves me’ your mates would get overexcited shouting stupid thinks like “Peter is you boyfriend” while nursing a broken heart.

There was a girl I kept running into who wasn’t a friend but I had seen her around just a girl walking her dog. Over the weeks, we got talking about school mainly I remember and that kind of thing. I was not thinking girlfriend material not that she wasn’t pretty we just talked. We were sitting around one evening and for some reason I did the daisy thing it fell on ‘she loves me’, no laughter just silence which I didn’t follow up.

That was a Friday on the Monday she wasn’t there and for weeks no sign of her until a month or so later I saw her walking with some guy who I took to be her boyfriend. I often wondered if I was to have said something at that time what would have happened.