Lady Nicolai's Parrot
"'Quite the inseparables you are. Like the Dioscuri, Castor and Pollux, twinkling among the field of stars.' Lady Holland blinked. 'Doesn't Lady Nicolai have some parrots which are inseparable, too? Luttrell?' Her fan hit the arm of the man who was just trying to squeeze past them."
Normally, I don't write people I know into my books. But sometimes such a perfect opportunity presents itself that I just can't resist the temptation. In this case, I wanted to use another simile to describe Troy's inseparable friends. I had already compared them to Castor and Pollux, the famous twins of Greek mythology and Zeus's sons, whom he had begot on Leda in form of a swan. Castor and Pollux are nicknamed the Inseparables, and this reminded me of lovebirds, which are called die Unzertrennlichen in German - the inseparables.
But why "Lady Nicolai"?
As I've said, I just couldn't resist the temptation *g*: My best friend of my early teens, Nicola, had a pair of green-masked lovebirds - and one of them did indeed die while trying to lay an egg. Below you can see Nicki and me, at the age of 14.
