All the Threes..

Since I was a kid there were certain things I had to do exactly three times, or in multiples of three (never four, never ever four). This was a direct consequence of my morbid concerns over my father’s mortality. If I didn’t do things three times then there would be dire consequences in this regard. Simply put, my father would die.

It was this dreadful responsibility that saw me running back three hundred yards to the very start of the stretch of railings to make sure I ‘tapped three, missed three, tapped three, missed three’. Even at aged twelve I vaguely envisioned myself tapping railings for the rest of my life; never getting it right, running back to the start time and again all in the cause of keeping my unwitting father alive.

And still I’m doing it; forty years later and ten after my father has actually died. It has become part of a worthless lifetime routine, an OCD I daren’t shake in case something unimaginable happens.

Three is a significant number. Triad trinity triangle. Father Son and Holy Ghost. Wilson Kepple and Betty.  Four, they say, is a perfect number, the square, the four winds, the four horsemen of the apocalypse , but I didn’t want my father dying in his forties, had to be at least sixty or preferably in his nineties.

Tetraphobia is fear of the number four apparently common in East Asia where they associate that number with ‘death’. It was also much feared in south Glasgow by a young teenager.

There was a cupboard in my room. I had to get into bed of a night, then get up and open and close the cupboard door. I had to do this three times and then try to convince myself to sleep keeping the urgent thought out of my mind that somehow I hadn’t performed the ritual properly and that I had to do it again. Because if I had to do it again; I’d have to do it a third time to keep everything balanced up.

The only other person I’ve ever met who suffered from something similar was my wee mate Davy from Cumbernauld. We’d spend hilarious hours tormenting each other with things we had to do to prevent our loved ones mysteriously perishing. I once made him do a ‘goat dance’ in the middle of the public bar in the Red Lion. With his big bush of red hair and beard and half-drunk he looked like a down-at-heel Jacobite bucking and snorting around the pool table.

Bought his old man a few years with that performance….