Playful

My friend Richard is very playful.

One day he gave me a packet of sunflower seeds. He said they were special giant sunflower seeds he’d acquired from Japan. The packet had quite specific instructions on it:

Place the seeds in the freezer for seven days.
Plant the seeds in pots, leave in a warm place and visit daily.
Talking to the seeds is also recommended - a daily Nonsense rhyme may also encourage them.

Just before I got round to taking step number one another friend who had also received some seeds told me that the whole thing was one of Richard’s playful jokes.

Richard is a ceramic artist. The seeds are ceramic and the packet was made by a friend of his. When you look at the packet carefully there are all kind of clues on there which should have alerted me to the joke. The make of the seeds is “Nonsen’s Nogro”. It states that the seeds can be sown all year round but best before April 1st and the latin name is “Sunflower Gigantus Ceramicus". I hadn’t spotted any of these clues.

My playful friend still laughs about how close I came to planting these and singing rhymes to them to help them grow.

I keep the seeds because despite the joke they are very beautifully made and are lovely to pick up and touch.