DO you consider yourself to be lucky? I don’t. And before you accuse me of feeling sorry for myself you only have to take a quick look at my supposed friends to know I’m telling the truth. That mob at 103.6FM Tameside Radio. Well …
Because of my lack of luck I rarely gamble. I generally bet on two races a year: the Grand National and the Cheltenham Gold Cup. Being a little cash-strapped I decided to give the Gold Cup a miss this year and yes, you’ve got it, the horse I would have backed romped home.
I can almost hear you saying: “Elsbels, this bloke’s a saddo.” But let me give you another example. My new year’s resolution was to be positive. I decided to make a bold entry into 2011 and spent £30 on joining an internet dating site. It was time to let the women of Manchester realise what they have been missing.
And what happened. Far from being swamped with offers from curvaceous blondes I received just the one reply, from Rajesh, an Indian man.
To rub salt into the wound, his e-mail came with a note stating: “Unlikely to be acceptable because of your non-negotiable request for females only.”
Last weekend I got that ridiculous text about all the ones in this year’s calendar as in 1/1/11, 11/1/11, 1/11/11 and 11/11/11. Then there was some bumf about taking the last two digits of your year of birth, adding the age you will be this year and the result being 111 for everyone. Whoopee! Do the same thing for 2010 and the sum always comes to 110. It’s interesting, I suppose, but hardly indicative of strange mystic forces at work.
The text goes on to say that October will have five Saturdays, Sundays and Mondays – the first time for 823 years. Is that relevant? There were five Saturdays, Sundays and Mondays last July. The claim is that this year is a moneybags year according to feng shui. Just send the text to eight good friends I was told, and you’ll get some money within four days.
What a load of cobblers. Like an idiot I went along with it – knowing all the time it was garbage – and so it proved. I am not one penny better off – in fact it probably cost £3 of the credit on my phone. Which just goes to prove that superstitions are a load of nonsense.
Did you know that when you’re born, the midwife has a stronger gravitational pull on you than any planet? Yet so many people believe the twaddle that gets trotted out in newspaper stars columns. Many years ago a woman actually rang the paper I was working for and blamed us for the fact her mother had slipped in Ashton and sprained an ankle. Had we remembered to put the horoscopes in, her mother would have been warned to be careful. Poor deluded thing.
I suppose some people are born lucky and some, like me, aren’t. So I’ll leave you with a final story.
Twenty years ago a girl challenged me to have my tea leaves read by a clairvoyant. The predictions I was given were that I would work as a courier on a cruise liner and to be careful because lots of married women would want to have affairs with me.
And what happened? No married woman has ever spoken up and the nearest I’ve been to a cruise liner is the Stamford Park pleasure boat.