The Office for the Harmonisation of Superstitions

The proposed Office for the Harmonisation of Superstitions will need a large department devoted to cats and horseshoes. I’m completely confused about black cats now. In one place people tell me they are lucky, and in another people tell me they should be cursed and stoned, especially if they cross your path on a Tuesday. I now have no idea what to do when I see a black cat. The only solution is to entirely avoid seeing black cats by walking around with my eyes closed. Unfortunately this must also be unlucky, because I keep falling down stairs and being run over.

The horseshoe problem is more easily solved. Horseshoes are considered lucky in many parts of Europe, but there is no universal agreement as to which way up they should be. In England horseshoes should always be upright—so they resemble a ‘u’—otherwise all the luck pours out. In Poland they are sometimes upright and sometimes upside-down, nobody seems to care. To prevent stress to British tourists, all horseshoes in the EU should be remounted in the correct position. Responsibility for checking that horseshoes are the right way up should be added to the duties of chimney sweeps.

Most superstitions apply to home life. When your home is half Polish and half English, like mine, this can lead to some confusion. Salt is not a problem. We can both agree on the detrimental effects of spilling salt, although the sheer amount of salt that gets thrown around during Polish cooking makes this almost impossible to avoid. The real problems are with handbags, shoes and umbrellas. The English have a longstanding superstition against opening umbrellas indoors, probably because we don't want to encourage rain inside the house as well as outside. Poles, on the other hand, habitually leave umbrellas open indoors to dry. Superstitious British people visiting a Polish household on a rainy day are at high risk of a heart attack.

Two odd Polish superstitions that I’ve never come across anywhere else forbid new shoes on tables and women's handbags on floors. It’s superstitions like this that make me wonder if somebody somewhere didn’t invent them just to annoy people. No new shoes on tables? The table is the irresistibly obvious place for new shoes. You put the box on the table, open the box and look at them. What’s unlucky about that? Apart from the fact that you may discover you’ve bought rubbish shoes. Equally, the floor is the obvious place for handbags. My wife has such a huge number of handbags that there is no room on the coat stand for anything else. My coat goes on the floor, which apparently isn’t unlucky. Now I come to think of it, my wife may have invented the handbag rule just so that she could have exclusive use of the coat stand. She did recently try to persuade me that failing to watch every single episode of Mam Talent brings seven years of bad luck, so she’s not entirely trustworthy. It’s for situations like this
that we need a rigorously vetted list of official EU superstitions.

The Official Superstition Initiative could be enormously useful to EU rule makers, who have a reputation for inventing bizarre laws about the acceptable curvature of bananas. Instead of publishing new regulations, just make them new superstitions. Rather than having a law governing the width of doors in new buildings, just introduce a superstition that says: “Doors less than 770 mm wide let the Devil in.” A lot of superstitions are simply common sense safety advice in disguise anyway. Is walking under a ladder really unlucky, or just a bad idea. Why is it not okay to walk under ladders, but okay to walk under people on stilts? Is it just rungs that are unlucky? Health and safety regulations will suddenly become fun. Instead of those “Beware: Slippery surface” signs they put up in supermarkets when somebody drops eggs, they will say: ”Spin around three times and touch wood or Satan will steal your children!” It will save a fortune in litigation, and eggs.

Jamie Stokes