Keys left in doors, wallets on car roofs, dropped knives, and diaries left in taxis - I’ve escaped the consequences of them all thanks to the universal smile.
The crowded, frantic mind has a lot to answer for when it comes to doing the dumb things that Paul Kelly sang about.
I did a dumb thing this week and got away with it.
My mind was crowded with the annoying stuff of life, like bills and dates, how to stop a puppy jumping up and peeing everywhere, and the persistent jabber of children pestering for a legal will to be signed and sealed before you die.
That’s enough to crowd a mind and prevent even the steeliest trap from containing everything.
No wonder, we all eventually rely on luck to get us through.
I have no answer to the question of why our lives don’t run like a predictable small part of the giant engine of the universe, but I’m working on a theory.
And here it is: I think we’re all born with an invisible bag of lucky tokens around our neck which we dip into whenever we’re desperate.
And just like coins at a poker machine, they eventually run out to leave you stranded and luckless at the last hurdle.
Shark attack survivors are pretty close to running out of tokens. So is anyone who walks away from a plane crash.
On a slightly less grievous scale, I used up a lot of my lucky tokens a few years ago when I left the keys to my shiny green Kawasaki 650cc motorcycle outside my London flat. Of course, the next morning, the source of all my heroic joy was gone.
I chewed my lip for an hour before I put the loss down to another pathetic item in the growing list of dumb things I have done.
Nevertheless, I never stopped searching for a flash of green at every traffic light and street corner.
At the time, I was employed as a motorcycle courier for a news agency, which meant I used a company motorcycle to deliver photos and copy around the giant metropolis.
Three months later, I was in the middle of the daily rapid river of metal negotiating Trafalgar Square when I saw a flash of emerald in the corner of my eye.
I checked it out at the next set of lights, and yes, it was mine.
I followed the rider and his pillion for about ten miles through north London until they stopped and dismounted and went into a café on Hornsey High Street.
I flagged down a police car, the miscreants were arrested, and I got my green dream back. The universe smiled and forgave my recklessness in return for half a bag of lucky tokens.
Forty years later, I was walking along a Goulburn River path with Desmond the peeing dancer when my phone pinged.
It was my daughter with life-changing news, so I had to check the text, which involved removing my glasses because I’m short-sighted, thanks to the bad luck of inheriting my paternal genes.
Obviously, the lucky token bag only operates postnatally.
That night I sat down to watch Thunderbirds Are Go on SBS and needed my glasses to catch the nuances of Lady Penelope’s mouth movements, which delivered every emotion from astonishment to husky satire with a quiver of the bottom lip.
After searching the house, I concluded my glasses were dropped on the bush track and were certainly by now transformed into dog or kangaroo pooh, magpie treasure or mangled under a walker’s boot.
The next morning, I retraced my steps to find my specs lying undamaged bang smack in the middle of the track.
The universe had smiled on me, and my dumbness was forgiven.
However, after nearly 70 years of desperate dipping, my bag of lucky tokens is now close to empty, and the final hurdle is fast approaching.
John Lewis is a former journalist at The News.
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