They warned me not to do it. "We wouldn't do it ... You're just tempting fate ... you'll only regret it," they said.

"Phooey," I told them. "You can't scare me."

"Good for you," said The Mother. "Take no notice of what they say, it's a lot of nonsense."

"I know," I said. "They mean well but yes, it is rubbish."

They - a couple of my friends that is - were appalled to hear I intended travelling to Yorkshire on a Friday. Not just any old Friday, of course, but Friday, June the 13th.

"That's asking for trouble," said one. "I wouldn't leave the house unless I had to on the 13th and definitely, certainly, absolutely not on Friday the 13th."

"What a load of superstitious codswallop," I said.

Mind you, I'm not a person who travels happily on any day or date. I believe that the worst that can happen usually will - whether it's Friday the 13th or Saturday the 14th.

Which is what I told my second friend, who used to commute to London daily and was trying to persuade me to travel on the Saturday.

"Look," I said, "are you really trying to tell me that people whose sanity is not in any doubt will actually be cowering in their homes on the 13th?

"What did you do when a Friday the 13th cropped up and they were expecting you at the office?"

"I rang in sick," she said.

"No wonder you were made redundant," I told her.

I stopped being superstitious myself some time ago after totting up how many mirrors I'd broken. I reckoned I'd probably acquired 130 years bad luck with my breakages and hey, I'm still standing!

And as for it being unlucky to walk under a ladder ... Well, yes, it can be but not necessarily for the person who walks under the ladder.

A retired builder friend of mine once told me how he had been working on a roof in the centre of Brighton on a Sunday morning.

Someone had walked under his ladder and in doing so, had inadvertently nudged it so that it slipped slightly.

When my friend tried to climb down from the roof, he found the ladder was out of reach and he was stranded.

Being a Sunday morning and being the middle of January, not many people were about. He was stuck on the roof, shouting and freezing, for almost two hours before being spotted. Now that's what I call bad luck.

Seeing that they were making no impact, my friends went away but one returned the next day.

"As you refuse to listen to advice, what you need is one of these," she said and handed me a little St Christopher on a key ring.

Now even I was taken aback by this kindness, though I thought it totally unnecessary.

I promised to carry the St Christopher with me on my travels - and then I lost it.

"Are you looking for that St Christopher?" said The Mother, a couple of days before I was due to leave. She had caught me searching through the drawers in my dressing table.

"No, not really," I said. "I was actually looking for something else."

"What's that?" The Mother asked.

"Oh, nothing important," I said.

Well, I could hardly tell her I was searching for my lucky rabbit's foot.