Some are born lucky, some have bad luck thrust upon them.

They say you make your own luck although I have never had any luck working out who ‘they’ are. As a man who often drags defeat from the jaws of victory, I class myself as unlucky. Bad luck is sitting on a table opposite a senior manager and not realising your trousers have split, it is tripping over invisible obstacles or being stricken by objects falling from the sky. I have been the victim of all of the above.

I know one chap who would fall in a barrel of teats and come out sucking his own thumb. Many moons ago his car ran out of petrol so he decided to thumb a lift. Walking along the grassy verge there was little room for pedestrian manoeuvre. Perturbed at having had no luck for 10 minutes he became more animated and thrust his thumb as far out as he could. At that moment a touring caravan came whizzing past, caught his digit and snapped it in two before continuing its journey to some damp outpost.

Strangely enough the only time I relied on my thumb as a mode of transport was on the same stretch of road where I jumped into a deviant looking rotund man’s car. As I did, I made a vow to not drink anything he offered and keep the door unlocked in case I had to make an ungainly exit at traffic lights. I hopped in and trod on his Elvis CD breaking it clean in half. He was visibly angry so I ended up remunerating him with a five pound note when a cab at the time would have cost around £3.

Another friend, a forces firearms instructor chopped his finger clean off in a door of a Citroen Saxo and had to cease a distinguished military career. Musicians are also not immune. A drummer went to a community event. With youthful exuberance he saw a vacant drum kit, ran over and jumped onto the stool. Unbeknown to him the stool had a serious structural fault. The foam seat collapsed under his weight onto a metal spike. Gravity took control and the spike impaled itself in the most unfortunate of places. This rendered him incapacitated and facing many months of corrective surgery along with him being the ‘butt’ of his mate’s jokes.

At work a few years ago a colleague made the mistake of snacking on Sun maid raisins which he was sure were laced with lashings of laxative. Upon clearing out the system he had the realisation that there was no toilet paper. The open plan layout did not allow him to do the shuffle of shame to source some Andrex in a neighbouring trap. Like a poor man’s member of the Territorial SAS he decided to wait it out. 10 minutes later, with the lesson started and the knowledge that 24 kids were probably trashing his classroom, he heard a sound in the next cubicle. Coyly he put his hand under the gap, waved and said; Hi, can you pass me some paper please’? Unbeknown to him it was a colleague with whom he wasn’t on the best of terms and he proceeded to pass him one square of paper. He then repeated the request 6 times and left the facilities humiliated before fielding uncomfortable questions from management as to his going missing in education action.

Another acquaintance was once run over by a steamroller. Working on a road gang, he was standing on the roller before unexpectedly fainting. He never worked again, but ‘luckily’ his body was pushed into soft 500-degree tarmac saving him from death. He looked like a haggard flower that had been pressed between the pages of a hardback book.

The unluckiest story of all award has to go to Garfield Morton and Kim Gorton. Morton and Gorton sounding like a 70’s sitcom writing team, are lifelong burglars. They recently, inadvisably, broke into the house of notorious gay sex predator, Harry Harrington aka the ‘Wolfman’. At 6’7 and weighing over 300lbs, he caught them and kept them captive for 5 days subjecting them to unimaginable abuse before their wails of pain were heard by a neighbour who called 911. Suffice to say their decades long burglary careers are behind them, as was the Wolfman.

The next time I am asked ‘how your luck? I will think of the burglars, the thumb, finger and drum stool and thank my lucky stars that although I may have been knocked off a motorbike after being hit by a remote controlled aeroplane, my misfortune is minor compared to some.