The first bloom of jacarandas always transports me to my student days. In my first year at university my mother regaled me with the superstitions students harboured when she was a student. The belief is that you’ll pass your exams if a jacaranda bloom falls on your head. Others claimed you’ll pass one subject for every bloom that drops on your head. Either way, it became a game for one of my particularly crazy friends and myself. It was not at all surprising if one of us would jump up mid-sentence and do a quick shuffle to the left or right to catch a bloom mid-fall. Once a brown, wilted bloom dropped on my head and I wondered whether this was, in fact, a sign of BAD luck. We concluded that it wasn’t – it definitely counted...