Skip to main content

Luck is a Four Letter Word

Have you ever thought of where luck comes from; a big bucket, a particular ray of light, or that strange cloud that seems to be hovering and moves as we move . Some days can be triumphs or disasters. The people who look inside our heads tell us it is the power of suggestion. Sometimes you wonder as you tempt lady luck.

Every day someone scratches a winning ticket, but I have never met one. Do you suppose they are taken away after they have screamed their heads off, and put into some kind of restraint? Or are they just trotted out each day so that ordinary mortals may feel the urge to try.

I have stood in awe and watched sane men and women scratch their way through the ticket, the surface of the table and eventually the table. As if the glittering prize had slipped under several layers of plywood. The poor unfortunates gnash their teeth, frown at the clear sky, mumble something unintelligible as they shamble away knowing that the grocery money has been seriously depleted.

One particularly disastrous day as I led the way from the newsagent, I mentally bemoaned my fate and fell over a wheelchair. I resolved to complete the day without further incident. I should have checked with the fates, because I had not seen the end of that day. Arriving home I collected my dogs, bait, and fishing rod and set out for our fishing spot.

Everything was normal until I had a bite. The reel seized up, the fish disappeared and wonderful lumps of nylon appeared. Ten minutes later we tried again. Another bite; the reel seized up and my lips moved erratically. I took the rig off and put it on the chair. Metres of line were lost in a maddened frenzy as dusk descended and blackness enveloped me.

Not a problem, we have a torch. It was as useful as a burnt match. The fishing line suddenly had a life of its own and another ten minutes disappeared into the past. Finally we were about to rig up when I discovered one of the sinkers had sunk, into the soft sand. One sinker would have to do in the mouth of a force-nine gale. Reaching for the hook and swivel on the chair, I discovered that it also had a life of its own and had fled.

Perseverance is the name of the game that was not going to stop me. At this stage I determined to catch a fish. Bending to pick up the bait, I looked around to discover that my bait, an inert bag of bait, had been resurrected and eloped with the hook and swivel. Not a problem, I picked up the chair to fling it into the bush. Somehow it had wrapped itself around my leg and I was flat on the ground.

Looking around to see if I was on a movie set, I sheepishly slunk to the car. The tackle box that would not previously give up its treasure of sinkers promptly emptied its entire contents down the gap in the back seat. I put the rod through the gap in the window and turned to go to the drivers' side. 

Alas the cloud had not finished. I was now attached to the rod, and certainly not in passion. As the hook drew blood my resolve not to scream was shattered.


I didn’t go back to that fishing spot again, in case somebody waited with a restraint and whisked me off to the place where all those winning ticket holders are confined.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

My Dog Puddles

A talk this morning with my dog ‘Puddles’ while I performed a shampoo and bubble bath for ‘her Highness’, followed by a warm drying with a hairdryer. “Now don’t move while I do your tale, no not that way, over here.” We proceeded to do her perennial overcoat shortened of course for our summer. It may have lost length but the vibrancy of the fur denotes her level of health, it is shiny, fulsome, and robust. Enough so that the dryer is flat out coping with her water drenched coat required of course to ensure anything underneath is clean. She sashayed around picking the parts she wanted to be dried instead of relying on me, being a Shih Tzu/Maltese cross, she is somewhat bossy or selective of her body, you choose. This, of course, interfered with the area I had allowed for this task, so I spent most of the time soaking up the water on my clothes as she tried to push me back for her escape. For nine years I have washed her each week, but each time her actions are the same. The next da
Post a Comment
Read more

One way to wake up!

On a cold winters morning I was – of course off world, where I spend most of my waking hours –much to the chagrin of anybody trying to get any sense out of me. I wandered through the remains of an ancient civilisation looking for clues to the current conflagration now raging in this quadrant of the galaxy.  My boots were scuffing the crap lying about until a glimmer of something interesting caught my eye and as I bent down a ruddy great mouth fastened onto  my wrist and commenced trying to remove it in one bite. My mouth went into a rictus as my other hand came up to rip the offending beast from my hand when I suddenly came upright in bed with tiger wrapped around my hand and giving me the best view of a wild cat. As I sat on the side of the bed I managed to remove him by pushing him off (never in my presence harm an animal –for any reason) and as he turned around he meowed just as the kitten he is although he is a rather large cat for his age. Trying to stem th
Post a Comment
Read more

Protoplasm

Dark, confining solid walls, concrete floor, squeaking noises, shadows. dust mites. Moist heavy air one can almost eat. There is a strange energy in the air; a sense of fear, an aura of hopelessness, a foreboding. Where have they trapped us? I am sitting in the corner of a large dusty football-field sized bunker. There is some light; a stray, weird illumination. I think it’s coming from those sconces in the roof but I’m not sure. The light isn’t strong enough to see everything, but enough to see that it is difficult to find a way out. There aren’t any exit signs or any indication of floors in this place. I can’t see beyond the concrete barriers just to my left. The air moves slowly so I think that there are working fans, but that is coming from the side again to my left. There are ten of us here. We all responded to the same advertisement. We would take part in an experiment to test a new scientific application; it paid well. That was good enough for me. Laid off seven months
Post a Comment
Read more