Spectator Competition: Pinch punch

For Competition 3384, since this issue appears on the first of the month, you were invited to submit a short story featuring someone who is a slave to superstition. Every corner of the country used to have its own folkloric behaviours that have now been forgotten (one wonders why salt and mirrors and magpies etc stuck). These days individuals who use ritual to ward off misfortune are told they have OCD. Anyway, I was sorry not to have room for John O’Byrne’s story of Michelangelo painting the ceiling; David Silverman’s in which a man is cured of his hexakosioihexekontahexaphobia; Joseph Houlihan’s memoir of his Irish mother – and Janine Beacham’s entry in which a wife asks her sailor husband: ‘Do you really intend to voyage on the Ides of March, with a friend named Jonah, a red-headed captain nicknamed Ahab, and a ship sporting 13 black sails?’ The John Lewis vouchers go to the following.

If he watches the race, Reginald’s selection, which must never run in grey silks, unless the day is rainy, won’t win. If, with Reginald staring intently instead at the lately emptied paddock, his selection still doesn’t win, it will have been because Reginald wasn’t sporting his lucky jacket. Or, jacket present and correct, the horse will fail because, before leaving home for the races that morning, Reginald – preoccupied by certain irregularities of track form evident in the 4.20 at Thirsk – selected for the day a far from fortuitous green handkerchief. Reginald’s methods for picking winners are robustly scientific; few know better Britain’s thoroughbreds, the equine dietary regimes favoured by their trainers or the career-impacting extramarital affairs of their jockeys. But, watermarked as they are by superstitions excusing their failure to oblige on supernatural grounds, I should not follow Reginald’s tips, which seem invariably to run from stall 13.