There’s something endearing about tulips. When you’ve just bought them and put them in a vase, they have a kind of dispassionate beauty, all crisp and understated and put-together. Two days later, some of them are stretching their necks high into the sky, others are bowing low. And when they are withering and pale and all over the place, they’re somehow beautiful in an almost theatrical way with their opened petals, coughing pollen on the table-cloth.