Earlier this week, I threw away my lucky conker. I was wandering through a local park a few weeks ago and found this shiny little beauty next to the path. Ignoring a lifetime of believing only what’s actually true, I decided to make it my lucky conker. Sure enough, it started to work. My mental health seemed to improve, buses appeared on time, Liverpool and Wigan Warriors kept winning. It worked. All down to my lucky conker. Then, my lucky conker stopped working.
People got ill, someone very special died and far less important things happened, like my car being close to being in a semi-vegetative state. Other stuff seemed to be going wrong too, like a gold tooth falling out. The bloody conker that only last week was bringing me so much good luck had turned on me.
Weirdly, stupidly, I almost started to half-believe there was something in it. That lifeless conker had supernatural powers. Until reality hit me. This was even more stupid than believing in God or the power of spirit. I was fooling myself. There was no magical ‘sign’. I had temporarily taken leave of my senses.
I made things even worse at first by convincing myself that my conker was responsible for all the woes in my life and then throwing it away. Dispensing it to the great wide open would end the pain and misery once and for all. What was I thinking about?
Things have not improved since I disposed of said conker. People are still ill although some are demonstrably better than they were. I’ve had good personal news and bad. I’ve made good decisions, I have made bad ones. In the clear light of day, I realised how mad I had become.
I once had a work colleague who carried with him a ‘lucky peg’ that he became convinced saved his life when he was in a motorcar accident. I laughed, usually behind his back, mocking the sheer nonsense that this represented. And it did. Here I was doing much the same thing.
This episode probably represents the continuing fucked up nature of the weather in my head. Having all but given up on my ability to do just about anything, I clutched not at straws but a conker. All a bit desperate really.
There is no science behind superstition and superstition covers a wide range of subjects, from religion to the spirit world and beyond.
Life is hard enough without believing things that probably aren’t true. And when I said ‘probably aren’t true’, I mean almost certainly aren’t true. My conker proved that.
