Friday 13th -
Isle of Thanet Gazette - guess when! :-)
So what are your plans for today? Do they involve huddling beneath the duvet, looking fretfully at the calendar, praying for a black cat to spring fortuitously across your pillow? Or will you be out there, marching fearlessly beneath ladders, before returning home to put your umbrella up in the kitchen? Being of stern and sensible stuff, I myself wouldn't cancel anything that fell on a Friday 13th but I've known others flatly refuse to take a driving test, or even go out for dinner. Which is daft . One tends to fail that examination as a direct result of lurching down the road in a series of kangaroo-jumps, doing an emergency stop at a zebra crossing when there's nobody there or driving for half an hour round Margate with the handbrake on before the examiner draws one's attention to the smell ( I once managed all three), not because the date was suspect. And if you're going to choke to death on a lump of gristle or get Salmonella that's more likely to be your choice of dodgy kebab shop than the day of the week. The good editor of this newspaper was born on the 13th so has celebrated many a fine Birthday on a Friday. The only mishaps she could recall when pressed, were a barbecue getting rained on (hardly a surprise) and her developing a strange urge to disrupt her party, age six, by burying the sausages (I dread to think what Freud would have to say). Which all goes to show it is so much tosh. I am not immune to superstition. My own little foibles include the need to fling any spilled salt over my left shoulder, twitching if I see only one magpie and the conviction that I must never give a pair of shoes without first demanding a penny or two, thus preventing a friendship walking away. (Handy to remember in reverse if trying to get shot of someone). But as far as this week goes, I am sublimely confident that it's all happened already. I am writing this in an advanced state of jet-lag stupor after ten hours in a plane during which two members of our party threw up, one swelled alarmingly, a fourth mysteriously lost a bag and my dear friend Lyn-Marie let out a single, heartfelt expletive when a stewardess emptied a cup of coffee in her lap. (God Bless the stiff-upper-lip type of British Constitution in a Crisis that had her still smiling as she strode the length of the aircraft looking as though she needed some serious incontinence advice, returning with an airline blanket fashioned into a temporary sarong while the crew attempted to rescue her trousers with the hand-dryer.) Back home, the house was freezing, the building work unfinished, four hundred pounds worth of unwanted goods I had expressly cancelled had been delivered with a bill for twice that amount and there was an ominous-looking envelope from the Inland Revenue. What can possibly be left now? Of course if today I wrap my car round a tree or accidentally chop off my own legs then you can have the last laugh. But I won't, will I, because it's utter nonsense. Touch wood...