Valentine's Day is drawing closer and love is in the air! If you're like me and keep up weekly with the new Downton Abbey episodes, you will have noticed that tension is rising among the house servants. With two new footmen (one who is particularly handsome I might add :-) ), a new girl, and a widowed kitchen maid Daisy, the need for companionship has never been greater among the downstairs folk! Unfortunately, none of the feelings expressed so far are really being reciprocated. To make sense of all of the crushes being fostered in the newest season of Downton Abbey, I thought that I would make a digraph to represent the whole situation. As you can see below, the Downton Abbey digraph has a total of five nodes and 5 edges, one of which is a loop. I used nodes to represent the characters bitten by the love bug, and added little heart labels to the edges so that the information indicated by the arrow would be clearer. :-) If you don't remember the names of the characters, Daisy is the widowed kitchen maid. She's been working for the house for quite a while, being a regular on the show since Season 1. This season she's finally gotten the promotion to kitchen maid that she deserves after slaving in the kitchen for hours creating feast after feast for the upstairs folk to nibble at. Alfred and Jimmy are the two new footmen that have just been hired this season. Alfred was hired first after his aunt Miss O'Brien put in a good word for him with Lady and Lord Grantham. Jimmy was hired later on, his looks probably giving him the advantage in the job searching business. I feel lame about this but I haven't paid enough attention to know the actual name of the new girl. All I can say is that she is another servant that has just been hired and that she works as an assistant for Daisy in the kitchen. And finally, who would ever forget Thomas, the slimy scheming yet handsome footman who like Daisy has been on the show since the first season.
Now that I have "formally" introduced you to all of the characters in the show we can get down to the real gossip! Let's look at the graph now and see what it tells us. Following from the bottom left we have that Daisy likes Alfred, Alfred likes the new girl, the new girl likes Jimmy, and it appears that Thomas also likes Jimmy. I don't know if Jimmy likes anyone, but judging by his appearance I'll say that Jimmy likes Jimmy (hence the loop in the graph). With the exception of that one loop (which technically counts as a cycle of length 1) none of the feelings amongst are the servants are really being returned back. :-( Pity. I suppose that this Valentine's Day they'll all just have to buy themselves a box of chocolates and watch airings of Bridgette Jone's Diary.
