The nature of luck

I was walking across a fallow field to the pub with my two grandsons. ‘What’s this?’ said my 11-year-old Oscar, showing me a bone he’d noticed embedded in the footpath and prised out. I rubbed the mud off the delicate, strangely beautiful thing with my thumb. ‘That,’ I said, with more authority than knowledge, ‘is the shoulder blade of a hare. I’ll clean it up when we get back and if you keep it in your pocket it’ll bring you good luck.’ ‘What is luck?’ said Klynton, aged ten. ‘Hard to explain,’ I said. ‘Lucky people have mostly good things happen to them; unlucky people mostly bad. But nobody believes in luck any more. Not really.’

We were walking to the pub for a farewell supper. I’d rung up and booked a table. The grandsons had stayed with me in the borrowed house for three days. Early tomorrow they were leaving for Devon and the day after that I was returning to France.