I'm sitting at home today watching some rubbish on TV with Laura (the Kiwi), when, during a brief interval between rain showers, a single magpie lands on our windowsill and appears to stare at us with intense curiosity. Magpies often land on that windowsill, perhaps attracted by the glint of sunlight on the glass, or maybe by their own reflections.
"Oh god," says Laura, "a magpie! Give me your little finger, quick." She holds out her own finger, bent into a crook.
"Why?" I ask, quite reasonably.
"Just give me your finger!" she says.
"No," I say. "Why should I?"
"Because there's a magpie, why else?"
"That's hardly good enough of a reason," I say.
"We have to link little fingers and say jinx," she says, as if reasoning with a child. "Then we break the link."
"Why do we do that?"
"To break the chain!" She's getting more agitated.
"What chain?" I'm actually getting annoyed as well as finding this slightly amusing.
"The chain of bad luck," she says. "One magpie is bad luck, so you have to break the chain."
"Luck," I say, trying to sound supercilious, "is probability taken personally."
"I don't care what it is, so long as I don't have bad luck," she says, properly angry with me now. "He's about to fly away!"
"Why should the magpie care about your luck?" I ask her.
"It's one magpie for sorrow, two for joy," she says, deadly serious, "three for a girl, four for a boy." She looks at me with disdain usually reserved for idiots and Ryan Tubridy. "Don't you know anything?"
Laura stands and walks to the window. She gives the magpie a little wave and says genially, "Hello Mr. Magpie, how's your wife?"
"What?" I say.
"If you won't link fingers with me, that's the only way to get rid of the bad luck," she says. "Once, back in New Zealand, I saw a magpie in my garden but I didn't say hello to it, and the next day my cat ate my gerbil."
She finally decides to turn her back on the magpie and heads for the door.
"If I'm late for my acupuncture appointment because of that," she says, "I'm blaming you."
