Bad luck, a frequent visitor in my life...

PAV’S PATCH: THIS week, I want to focus on luck or, more accurately, bad luck.

Do you consider yourself lucky? Can you think of an instance when your luck really was out?

I’ve never had much luck in raffles. When I have, the original good luck has quickly gone sour.

For example, one Christmas I won a hamper. My prize was a shedload of tinned goods made by a company called Epicure.

Unfortunately, when I got home I found out that the goods were past their sell-by date. And I don’t mean by a week or two, I mean by four years. What a nice gesture by the person who donated the prize.

Still, I wasn’t as unlucky as a woman the following year who did all her Christmas baking and then found her hamper was similarly out of date. Who on earth keeps stuff like that in a cupboard for five years?

I think I’ve previously mentioned my mother getting a horse called Go Pontinental in a Grand National sweep only for it to be destroyed the day before the race. I once bought a first-goal ticket at Hyde United and was delighted to find that a penalty was given on the time I had, 18 minutes. Course, you know what happened, our ever-reliable top scorer missed.

That reminds me of when I was eight and in Mrs Walker’s class. We used to have a daily raffle in which we all answered a question and whoever’s was pulled out of the tin won a Milky Way or similar.

A lad called Philip Jones somehow won the raffle every day for a week. I won it two days running and was told it wouldn’t be fair for me to get two prizes on the trot. And you wonder why I’m bitter. He got five.

However, forget all my problems. I’m now going to introduce you to the unluckiest man in the world. He died earlier this year aged 93 and was called Tsutomu Yamaguchi.

He was heading for the railway station one bright August morning in 1945 when he saw a plane circling and two parachutes coming down.

Mr Yamaguchi was witnessing the US air force drop an atomic bomb on Hiroshima. He was two miles from the centre of the blast and was still thrown into a field by the fireball, which left him badly burned and with ruptured ear drums.

But somehow he managed to complete his 200-mile journey and arrived in Nagasaki — just in time for the Americans to drop the second atomic bomb.

Even Simon Bates’s “Our Tune” couldn’t come up with someone unluckier than that.