Recent trips to see friends are becoming increasingly surreal. It appears that if you travel anywhere with a baby people feel the need to carry out some form of arcane ritual in order to protect that little person from misfortune or to try to ensure her longevity. A Cypriot aunty put kolonya (lemon cologne) on a piece of cotton wool and insisted it should be tucked under her blankets. The intention behind the action is that she have a long life and the colour of the cotton wool represents the old white hair and beard of age. Pardon me for questioning the faith but are they not inadvertently wishing ugly elderly lady hirsuteness upon her. Surely everyone remembers recoiling from aged female relatives with inappropriate facial hair who would lean in to kiss you and let their lady beards brush against your soft childhood cheek?

Irish friends have crossed her palm with silver, albeit the silver strip in a £20 pound note. A Pakistani friend put honey on her lips and we kept quiet and said nothing about the dangers of botulism. Sezgin insists that she wear a blue-eye bead to ward off the curses of those not wishing her well and Mum, the Rajah of Rituals, tried to persuade me to put her shrivelled slightly smelly belly button remains in my purse to ensure that it would always have something in it. The aforementioned Sultan of Spells has carried Alev’s in her own purse for 28 years this Wednesday and has never been strapped for cash. The oddest experience though was when we went to some friends in Purfleet, they are originally from Istanbul and insisted that it was a Turkish tradition that we leave their flat with two carefully wrapped fresh eggs in our possession.

Superstition seems to weave through our lives and become espacially prominent around the time of important events. Each little ritual gains especially potent power as we hold our breath and hope, hope, hope for something good to occur or at the very least for disaster not to befall us. Particularly susceptible are sports players who face momentous matches on a regular basis, most will have small cereromonies they must carry out or amulets that they carry with them for good luck but some take it to extremes. Kevin Rhomberg was a US baseball player in the early 1980’s whose signature superstition was the need to touch back someone who had just touched him. If a person somehow eluded his touch he would send them a letter that said ‘This constitutes a touch’. Cleveland teammates would sadistically touch him and then run off and when someone sneakily bent under a toilet cubicle and touched him on the toe  Rhomberg’s response was to go round the clubhouse touching every player. An umpire once had to halt play during a game in New York to tell Yankee’s players to stop touching Rhomberg.

To be honest I find the prevalence of superstition interesting on an intellectual level and disappointing on an emotional one. The rites carried on around me indicate the tendencies of friends and family to believe without evidence and to disregard the true relation between cause and effect. It seems that humans are quite happy to account for one mystery with another and to submit to a creed of a world governed by chance and caprice. Superstition is part of our primitive mindset and its’ foundation is ignorance – in our weakness we seek to explain and digest the unexplainable and indigestible in palatable bitesize form.

In reality there is no connection between the superstitious activity and the anticipated effects. If a man catches a glimpse of the new moon over his left shoulder and says ‘That is bad luck’ he is only fooling himself. Whichever shoulder you see the moon over has no effect on the moon and neither can it change the influence of the moon on any earthly thing. Nothing would be different than if he had seen it over his right shoulder  except his own opinion. If thirteen is a dangerous number, twenty-six ought to be twice as dangerous and fifty-two four times as terrible.It used to be the case that all natural cataclysms were viewed as supernatural events and that prayer and ritual could ward them off. Earthquakes and cyclones filled the coffers of the church. In the midst of disasters the miser, with trembling hands, opened his purse and in the gloom of eclipses thieves and robbers divided their booty with God. As our understanding has increased we have realised that the wonders of the heavens have nothing to do with the fate of kings, nations or individuals. These things would not change if there wasn’t a single person on earth. Similarly no amount of eggs taken from one dwelling to another or a piece of placenta in the purse have no impact on the path of our lives, they are merely the scraps of past belief, diminished and undecipherable but still clinging to our 21st century behaviour patterns.

Although I am not superstitious I am happy to indulge the bizarre behaviour of others because I am well brought up. What I hope will befall Peri as a consequence of her many bestowed offerings is not a surfeit of good luck but a tolerance of other people’s quirky ways. I have hopes for her but they are not dependent on a 5-leafed shamrock facing south south-west on a wet Wednesday – if she has a good life it will be because she has learnt to be a good person and that takes hard work not random wishes.