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What's Your Jinx/What's Your Luck?

never let the truth get in the way of a good story ... rather than reinvent myself i think i just invented myself for the first time, and ive remained that way ever since
 
The vast majority of things we damn ourselves for are one day wonders.
Despite being a metaphorical God of Olympian proportions at work I did drop the occasional clanger.
"Oh well" I thought "in six months time who's going to remember?"
After years of experience I shortened it to a day or so.
Like announcing with great fanfare that I had given up smoking and receiving many encouraging noises.
Then being offered a fag the next day.
That sort of thing.
People have their own lives to lead, their own problems and worries.
Dwelling on the mistakes of the past is instructive in understanding how an obviously decent, self aware person can develop.
Defining a life by it may well be based on misguided and unfounded fears.
All the best.
 
henry said:
(joking about the pufters thing)
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I understand. It was pretty much the first wave of political correctness and if you'd said, or even implied, anything like that out loud you'd have been crucified. Most people would have been inclined to live-and-let-live and be understanding concerning the existance of different groups - in a university environment, for instance, which was probably the first opportunity many people had to explore that they were gay and to be so openly without incurring censure. (away from family, home and the sort of schools that didn't like it very much). You could understand that and say - hey, enjoy yourself. It's no big deal. It's just that the atmosphere encouraged people on the PC spectrum to get somewhat stridentand screechy about it, if you see what I mean: even if you weren't homophobic or sexist and accepted the right of others to do their own thing without hostility, some of the feminists we had and some of the spokespeople for gayness made you want to pass on homophobic or sexist jokes, simply to piss them off and dent their priggish self-righteousness. What you might call the Peter Tatchells, for instance...

I do recall the Union General Meeting that dissolved into farce when one of Thatcher's lapdogs, an MP called Harvey Proctor, was caught in some sort of chicanery and a debate about political corruption really degenerated. The Tories had to defend one of their own despite the fact he was doing things (being gay and rent-boys) that the Tory Party doesn't like very much and had strong views about. Cognitive dissonance in action. Meanwhile the Socialist Workers were challenged as to their attitude to gay people - they got caught in knots, wanting to attack the Tories but not wanting to be seen as homophobic... (That far-left notion that homosexuality is a degenerate disease of a capitalist society and will wither away as a deviation brought about by the pressures of capitalism, as True Socialism begins and sweeps away the corruption of the old...) politics like that is fun to watch and most educative! Meanwhile the feminist mafia was pitching in and shooting at all sides, especially if they were male and therefore damned by posession of a Y chromosome. I recall going for a drink in the bar with one of the most intelligent and likeable Tories I'd ever met - she'd stayed out of the fighting and was shaking her head ruefully. She ought to have become an MP, but maybe she was too maverick and too intelligent for the Tory Party... wonder where she went...
 
I was somewhat recognisable at UEA for my, er, interesting dress sense, among other things, but I never fell entirely or comfortably within specific social groups. I'd started growing my hair at the age of 16, by 19 I was wearing it in plaits, often wearing a cape (so I picked up the nicknames Asterix and Batman) but I also played a lot of sport where I was something of an outsider! Hey ho. In addition to my long hair and cape I had three pairs of silk trousers (pale green raw silk, white and lilac!!) that I'd be happy to get into now, a pair of very tight plastic trousers (white with black polka dots) that I could barely get into then when I was as skinny as a skinny thing. Among other things...

When I was at UEA it was a hotbed of leftwing politics, always linked with Essex and Sussex in the press, but most of my friends were, like myself, also at the liberal (small L) left-leaning end of the spectrum. I had friends from Norwich who were heavily involved with the SWP (or it may be the WRP; it's a while back!), which was then very active, but they were lovely people, in spite of their often bonkers Trotskyist views, notably the very lovely Ms R who'd been the head girl at Notre Dame High School, and her elderly mother Pat; I used to go round and cook for them occasionally and even cooked for Pat when R went to Cambridge University. She dropped out and swapped to Nottingham Uni; I don't think a Trotskyist from a Norwich council flat fitted well into the Cambridge milieu. Even more than a council house kid from Bath fitted in with the posher set at UEA. East Anglia was my first choice, as it was for my closest friends there - some of whom chose it over Oxbridge when they could have gone - where others wanted to go to Durham etc.

I only found out recently that Douglas Carswell, former UKIP MP, went to UEA. That would have gone down a storm in my day! (And probably yours...)

My next post will be about my Fortean experiences at UEA (yep, really!). I also think, given the number of people who post on this forum, that it's quite a coincidence that a handful of us not only went to UEA (student population c3500 when I was there) but were at Fifers Lane. And I've thought about my time at UEA more in the last week or so than I have in a while thanks to your posts. And AgProv, I hope that your posting has helped you with your feelings about the past.

And as an aside (and relating to Smokehead's post), I've been in my present 'career' now for more than 20 years, and I still feel like I'm busking it. Mistakes get forgotten, even when they can take on such massive proportions at the time.
 
Fortean at UEA Norwich. Let's write it! The university motto is "Do Different", after all... maybe there's something in the air.
 
i had more fun than forteana im afraid, inbetweeners style
 
Flat places inculcate a sense of reflection and melancholy. Discounting the generally flat North Sea for a second or two, East Anglia is the western extention of a large flat plain extending all the way into the Urals: a sort of British annex to the North european Plain and the Steppe. Being in a flat place under wide-open skies makes people think differently - very, very, small under a very big sky with faraway horizons. Apparently it's the reason why Russians sing melancholy songs and drink vodka. Why Germans used to want to march to those faraway horizons in large well-ordered hiking groups for mutual reassurance and see what was there. i'm betting it links to lots of fortean-related things!
 
AgProv said:
Flat places inculcate a sense of reflection and melancholy. ...
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The first time I encountered absolutely flat terrain (table-top-flat farmland to the horizon in all directions, with no rolling or ripples) it seriously creeped me out. The 'big sky effect' makes one feel smaller / diminished, and it induces a feeling I can only loosely term 'existential belittling'. This has never bothered me nearly so much out on the sea with no land in sight.

At least for me, it's not just a matter of the big sky overhead. There's something about the terrain's uniformity all the way to the horizon that insinuates an infinite extension of blandness, no prospect of variety or change, and hence something like futility.
 
GNC said:
Spot of bad luck:
https://www.pressreader.com/uk/the-herald/20170830/281590945700770

Climber bags every munro in Scotland - then breaks his leg on the last one (number 282).
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I can cap that... the French (or was it Swiss?) mountaineer who conquered the five highest peaks in the Himilayas, including Everest, without a hitch. He got home. A light bulb blew in his living room. He stood on a wobbly chair to reach up and change the bulb... then fell off. Broke his leg in three places.
 
EnolaGaia said:
The first time I encountered absolutely flat terrain (table-top-flat farmland to the horizon in all directions, with no rolling or ripples) it seriously creeped me out. The 'big sky effect' makes one feel smaller / diminished, and it induces a feeling I can only loosely term 'existential belittling'. This has never bothered me nearly so much out on the sea with no land in sight.

At least for me, it's not just a matter of the big sky overhead. There's something about the terrain's uniformity all the way to the horizon that insinuates an infinite extension of blandness, no prospect of variety or change, and hence something like futility.
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I was brought up in a very flat area so plains are an attractive, reassuringly familiar terrain to me. Hungary is like a much bigger version of my county so I loved living there!
Apart from the cold, brrr. My home area is well-sheltered so we don't actually have much weather.
 
His uncle bought him his ticket apparently. He came to PNE from Cork City so he wouldn't have been on a big wage there. But I guess that that doesn't matter now. Fans are already intending singing to him "give us a tenner"...
 
Slightly off centre ,but once ,in a pub I brought a raffle ticket 267 I think, and 'knew'it was the winner not hoped ,just knew it would be the winner I even told my pal Vicky ,'that's going win , it did win the prize being a play your cards right game guessing higher or lower playing cards ,I won sod all,but the unusual bit was the sense of knowing it was a winner:)
 
Ulalume said:
We all must have them, these areas where our fortune is uncannily good or unaccountably bad, for no reason we can see.

My own jinx is any kind of electronic banking card. No sooner have I swiped it through the reader than the system goes whackadoo. It doesn't matter what card or from what bank. It happens so often that I usually just pay cash to save everyone the trouble. Yesterday, alas, I had to use the card at the gas station. They had to call the manager in to sort out the resulting crash. The staff were looking at the machine in bewilderment, saying they've never seen it do that before. I said, yeah, that would be my jinx again. :oops:

My luck, on the other hand, has to do with clothes. They never wear out, or if they do, it's rarely. I have 15 year old socks that haven't even started to fray. If there's a sale, the last item left will be my size. Or people just give me their designer cast-offs. I figure the goddess of clothes must have blessed me at birth.

My favorite uncanny clothing story is this:

Back in the Spring of 2009 or thereabouts, the song Venus In Furs by Velvet Underground was stuck in my head. You know, "Shiny, shiny...shiny boots of leather..."

Soon our neighbor from down the street came to the door. She was moving back to California, she said, and was giving away anything that wouldn't fit in her car. So did I want this fur coat and patent leather boots? :eek:

The fur wan't ermine and I don't wear fur anyway, but I kept it because it was such an incredible coincidence. That, or Lou Reed had more mystical power than he let on. :p

So, my question for you, FTMB, is what's your jinx and what's your luck?
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Jinx is - I can't wear watches. They go haywire on me, or break ominously and randomly just as something bad happens to someone nearby. It's no big deal as I don't need to wear one, anyway and had stopped long before I had a mobile phone to tell me the time.

Luck? I just miss dangerous things (probably stastistically common, anyway). I was at the same place as the London bombings (and I go years without being in London) to the day and hour, precisely one week before it happened, having travelled down on the same train, I think. I was meant to go on the same tube line but had this unaccountable feeling of fear so stood and watched other people file down at Liverpool St then walked to Euston instead. Spanner thing falling from scaffolding just missing me, I posted about. And another I posted about - delaying a drive where someone jack-knifed across the road to the point I could well have been if I'd left the place and driven off immediately. (Saw an owl on the same spot a week before, standing in the road, right next to where the person died in a crash the following week). No feeling of prescience there, just too upset to drive immediately after I came out of ex's house.
 
What causes me bad luck? People buying scratch card after scratch card when I'm standing in que at shop and trying to top up my oyster. I always miss my bus, then my train. So have to wait and get their late. ;)
 
I'm not particularly lucky - raffles and the like never work out for me - but I think I am quite fortunate in terms of my health. Chickenpox as a baby and German measles a couple of times as a kid; I was sharing a room with my sister when she got mumps on holiday, but beyond some unusual grumpiness a couple of weeks later (according to my mum), no swollen face for me. I've never had 'flu either, to the best of my knowledge. Like Madam Snail, I don't do sick days - the last one I had, I think, was when I needed my nose cauterizing (circa 2012), so I was at work in the morning, drove home, walked to the hospital, had my procedure, and was back in work the next day. On the other hand, my knees are appalling, my teeth are worse and I was terribly prone to verrucas when I was younger, so maybe my health isn't that good after all...
 
How did you get rubella twice? Isn't it a one and done disease? Interested to know...
 
GNC said:
How did you get rubella twice? Isn't it a one and done disease? Interested to know...
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Good point. I don't know. I don't remember either time, beyond a vague memory of being on our sofa under a blanket at a point when I wouldn't normally have been there. Maybe I only had a very mild dose the first time? The lies our mothers tell us!

FWIW, my husband caught chickenpox as an adult even though his mum is certain he had it as a young child. Again, our hypothesis is that a very mild dose was caught the first time.
 
bugmum said:
Good point. I don't know. I don't remember either time, beyond a vague memory of being on our sofa under a blanket at a point when I wouldn't normally have been there. Maybe I only had a very mild dose the first time? The lies our mothers tell us!

FWIW, my husband caught chickenpox as an adult even though his mum is certain he had it as a young child. Again, our hypothesis is that a very mild dose was caught the first time.
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Re chickenpox - my eldest three got it at the same time. Eldest and baby (who was only six months' old and breast fed, so was surprised she got it at all) were pickled with spots. Middle had two spots, one on her forehead and one on her back. So when the two younger ones got the 'pox, I fully expected her to get it again. She didn't, instead younger daughter (who had been the pickled baby) got shingles. Aged about six.

Chickenpox has no justice!
 
catseye said:
Re chickenpox - my eldest three got it at the same time. Eldest and baby (who was only six months' old and breast fed, so was surprised she got it at all) were pickled with spots. Middle had two spots, one on her forehead and one on her back. So when the two younger ones got the 'pox, I fully expected her to get it again. She didn't, instead younger daughter (who had been the pickled baby) got shingles. Aged about six.

Chickenpox has no justice!
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Shingles at 6! :( Poor kid.
 
Mythopoeika said:
Shingles at 6! :( Poor kid.
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The worst bit was that her main symptom was a swollen lymph gland which gave her a lump under her armpit. You can imagine my panic and what I thought that was - until the doctor took blood tests and told me it was shingles. Which, given the alternatives, was a relief!
 
bugmum said:
I'm not particularly lucky - raffles and the like never work out for me - but I think I am quite fortunate in terms of my health. Chickenpox as a baby and German measles a couple of times as a kid; I was sharing a room with my sister when she got mumps on holiday, but beyond some unusual grumpiness a couple of weeks later (according to my mum), no swollen face for me. I've never had 'flu either, to the best of my knowledge. Like Madam Snail, I don't do sick days - the last one I had, I think, was when I needed my nose cauterizing (circa 2012), so I was at work in the morning, drove home, walked to the hospital, had my procedure, and was back in work the next day. On the other hand, my knees are appalling, my teeth are worse and I was terribly prone to verrucas when I was younger, so maybe my health isn't that good after all...
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You sound like my kinda woman. Immortal. I don't get many illnesses either. Do you have a high motabolism?[/QUOTE]
 
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I always put it down to my high metabolism why I rarely get ill. Work never sees that side of me however.
 
I went to hospital when I was small to have my tonsils out. My bro had them out a few months later. Then later down the line at high school. I was asked to play tonsil tennis. I don't have any tonsils dear. Did have something removed from my mouth about 7 years ago a lump. It wasn't anything bad.
 
bugmum said:
I HAVE a metabolism, whether it is high I knoweth not. Probably slowing down radically as the minutes tick by...
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The tall skinny ex* had strange beliefs. He used to brag that he had a high metabolism and so would never get fat.

Dunno where he got this idea but he LOVED it.
I, being short and chubby, obviously had a low metabolism which was nothing to be proud of.

I'd tell him this was rubbish and he'd argue, until we saw some pop science TV programme about nutrition which mentioned that thinner people have a lower metabolism which made their bodies less efficient at processing food into energy and body fat. (Also probably simplistic rubbish.)

After that he shut up about metabolisms. :chuckle:

*A high school science teacher no less.
 
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