‘Very superstitious, writing’s on the wall…’

With the hot weather now upon us, chez Smith we have started sleeping with the windows open. Not too wide, because our mischievous cat has a tendency to try and climb out, but wide enough to convince ourselves that the paltry breeze will cool us and our house down in the evening. The other morning, with bleary eyes I staggered to our bathroom to ready myself for work, and discovered that the eggs a spider had laid in the casings of the window had hatched, and because the window had been left open all night, the little spiderlings had found their way into our bathroom, leaving us with an infestation of money spiders not only in every corner, but in the toothbrush pot, medicine cabinet and on the shower head; not only did I find several hanging from my shaving mirror, but one clever chap had made a little web inside the head of my razor. One of the window panes alone was home to around one hundred of the tiny black arachnids.

Without thinking I swept a few handfuls into a tissue and flushed them down the toilet, before suddenly remembering the superstitions that my mother had instilled in me about killing spiders, and money spiders in particular. She always told me not to kill spiders because of the bad luck that such killing would bring, especially if these were money spiders. Money spiders, she informed me, should be allowed to crawl on you to see if they moved toward your heart – if they did, you’d be rich. By my reckoning, my spider killing spree early that morning will have put me in chronic debt for the rest of not only my life, but my daughter’s and likely the next three generations to follow her.

I’d like to think of myself as someone who is not superstitious, but like the next person will find myself sucked into believing such things just in case they are in fact totally true. When especially confident, I do walk under ladders, but find myself wondering anxiously afterwards whether something bad will become of me; such a preoccupation with what might happen could easily force me into falling under a bus for all I know, in which case the old superstition would have become true.

My mother has given me plenty of novel superstitions, most of which I no longer heed, at least not consciously. One that I do recall is that you should never tell anyone about a dream you’ve had on a Friday night until after lunch on a Saturday. I have my doubts about this one, I have to say. A suspicious part of me thinks that this one was invented, perhaps by my mother, to make sure I didn’t spend ages on a Saturday morning explaining the dream I’d had on a Friday, thus making us late for our weekly trip into town. The frustrating thing is that I used to have my most vivid dreams on a Friday night, and by lunchtime would have completely forgotten them. But to this day I consciously stop myself discussing a really weird, nonsensical dream on a Saturday morning, just in case.

It wasn’t just my mother that handed down slightly dubious things to avoid if you wanted good fortune. My friend Steve is perhaps the most superstitious individual I've ever met, and the two superstitions I recall most vividly from him were both bird-related. The first was that if you see a hearse you need to hold your collar until you see a bird flying overhead. I don’t know who invented such claptrap but nevertheless, because it’s connected to death I do find myself obeying this one on the rare occasion that I see a hearse on the road.

The other of Steve’s was regarding magpies. Seeing a solitary magpie was, according to wherever Steve inherited this one from, terrible luck, unless you saluted it. This one never really bothered me too much, because the three previous towns I've lived in evidently had very small magpie populations. However after moving to Milton Keynes three years ago I think we must have moved to the UK’s largest concentration of the black and white scavengers. They’re absolutely everywhere. It does occur to me that they should – rather than the concrete cows MK is infamous for – become our town’s mascot; or perhaps they are like the ravens of the Tower of London – if the magpies leave then the town will collapse in on itself. Nevertheless, despite claiming not to be superstitious, if you ever should come across me in Milton Keynes and find me saluting quite involuntarily like some war veteran who can’t acclimatise back into civilian life, you’ll know why.

From someone else – possibly Steve, possibly some other superstitious individual – I learned a rhyme about magpies. It goes like this

One for sorrow
Two for joy
Three for a girl
Four for a boy

Now, this has to be complete nonsense, of course it does: unless magpies are the ultimate deciders of fate or the purest essence of God on earth, how can the simple act of seeing a certain combination of magpies determine whether you’re going to be happy, or decide the sex of your baby? More importantly, what happens if you see three but a fourth is just slightly out of your view? What happens then? You’ll merrily enjoy the childless years thinking that fate has already decided that you’ll be blessed with a girl only to discover, after painting the nursery pink that in fact you’re being handed a boy in the hospital. And what if you see five or six or more than that? I’ve seen twelve at one time in Milton Keynes – are there other lines in this rhyme that further decide your fate? Does seeing a dozen magpies mean perchance that you will win the lottery this Saturday?

While I await the answers to these questions, I don’t entertain this one for a second. Well, maybe I do a little. Okay, every time I see a magpie I’ll either salute or recite said poem to myself. And actually, after having paid for a private scan to determine whether my wife was expecting a girl or a boy, I did find myself paying more attention that usual to the combination of magpies I would happen across on a normal day. We’d come away from the scan feeling of course elated that the consultant had confirmed we were expecting a daughter, but a niggling doubt remained that – despite his assertions that he’d not got one wrong yet – we were going to fall into the 1% of the claim that these scans are 99% accurate; the small print that if the scan confirms the foetus to be a girl, there is a greater degree of probability that the result could be inaccurate didn’t exactly put our minds at ease either. So we found ourselves turning ever more to the traditional means of determining whether a baby is going to be a boy or girl by the position of the bump, the cravings etc. And the number of magpies.

Perhaps I am more superstitious than I claim not to be. For example, faced with a difficult client meeting today, I chose a red patterned tie – ostensibly because I thought it went best with my suit, but deep down because a tiny part of me considers it to be a lucky tie, because when I was previously faced with a tricky client I handled it well while wearing that tie. Back further, when revising for my GCSEs I found that I worked best with music on, specifically Depeche Mode’s double live album 101, which was the perfect length for a good session of concentration. After getting above-average GCSE results, when it came to A-levels, and later still with my degree, I found that I still needed to listen to this album when revising, just in case it was this – and not my hard work and memory – that gave me the grades I’d achieved.

In a way a part of me is quite drawn to the simplistic means of making sense of natural and sad events, just by avoiding certain actions. Superstition is borne out of a need to rationalise things that cannot be rationalised, sitting between Darwinism and religion, and to this day I still don’t know which side of that controversial fence I belong on. Having a baby has made me question my beliefs about creation, because I can’t see how life could have been created out of nothing; but neither can I believe that some ethereal being implanted another being inside my wife’s womb. Therefore, until I can resolve my own beliefs I’ll continue to salute magpies, keep my Friday dreams to myself and hope that my single-handed spider extinction programme from the other morning has not ruined my chances of being able to provide for my daughter and has at least blessed us with a modicum of good fortune (fingers crossed).