Superstitious Wallace

Image: Geoff Phutter

Honest friends are your best friends.

Recently I've been writing rather haughtily about the new-agers and the superstitious types who always send on those chain mails for fear of bad luck...A good friend has just reminded me that in the dim and distant past I was just as guilty of this absurd behaviour. I don't think that makes me a hypocrite, because I've been 'clean' for quite some time, but I think it's important that I admit to you all that I was once living in a box.

It was not long before my mother passed away that I developed the fixation with the number 32. I don't know where it came from, but I awoke one morning and there it was; this little number buzzing around in the empty husk that makes me walk and talk. For a while it became an integral part of my thought process, it drove quite a few decisions: who to talk to, where to walk, where to sit, what to eat...the important stuff..anyway the obsessive behaviour thankfully peaked and subsided, but the belief lingered well into my twenties. Like a kind of phantom crutch that I could lean on if things got a little bit awkward. When I look back, it doesn't surprise me much. I needed it; was too reliant on it to do anything about it, so perhaps I shouldn't be surprised when others use something similar.