Third Light

Superstition is rife everywhere you look, whole swathes of superstitious practices and thought the world over.

My old granny was as practical-minded a person as you could ever meet but she wouldn’t let me in the door one new years day before she’d shoved a packet of custard creams through her letterbox so I wouldn’t ‘first-foot’ without an offering denoting future prosperity (and hell mend you if you ever opened an umbrella in her house or put shoes on a table).

Some years ago I was commissioned to dig a hole for the internment of someone’s ashes and, having done this, I couldn’t rest until I’d re-dug it and re-positioned the urn so it was lying ‘just right’ in the excavation. I felt that ‘resting in peace’ was endangered by my seeming sloppiness.

At the extreme, some folk are superstitious to the point of OCD. Visiting a friend's house one day we were leaving for a drive in her car when she stopped and said “look at this”.

A young girl was attempting to leave a house opposite with her dog on a leash. She’d close the door, shove it about five times to ensure it was shut, take five steps away with the dog then return to the door to begin the whole process again. I swear she must have done this about fifty times until whatever fevered calculation her brain was making was somehow satisfied (some extended multiple of five it seemed like) and she managed to take the puzzled and yanked about dog for its walk (I wondered afterwards if maybe the hound developed the doggy version of OCD thinking it was some sort of command to behave in this repetitive back and forward fashion and also if it developed neck strain).

Myself? It is multiples of three and originates from fear of my dad dying if I didn’t perform certain actions and one day I met a friend who suffered the same affliction. Wee Davy (I was Big Davy) could be manipulated by me (and consequently I by him) into doing the very weirdest things if I pulled the trigger of his morbid superstition. One night while sitting bored in the pub over a couple of pints we were discussing our mutual idiosyncrasy when I of a sudden suggested he must perform a ‘goat dance’ around the pool table completing three circuits to avoid the almost immediate extinction of at least one of his parents sitting oblivious to their impending doom in the family homestead 400 miles away in Cumbernauld.

To the evident surprise and amusement to the other regulars and, certainly, the two chaps enjoying a game of pool, Davy completed this bizarre task without question. Such is the power of superstition. I paid for this later by performing the utterly drunken and juvenile act of hurling a brick through a window of the DHSS offices on the way home, thus saving my father from a gruesome end.