6 August 2011
It seems to me that superstitions are a strange idea all round really. So many folks have their own little ones as well as the well know ones like breaking a mirror bringing 7 years bad luck or 'touching wood'. Take my mother for instance ...
She wasn't at all worried about the broken mirror one at all calling it a silly superstition and she didn't believe in them. But if she went into the kitchen and saw a pair of knives with their blades crossed she would throw the bottom one the floor and refused to pick it up. "Oh no, the devil will get me if I didn't do it." Spilt salt would mean she had to throw some over our left shoulder; as kids we had to wear new clothes on Easter Sunday otherwise the bird will crap on you."; nail cutting was another one, you shouldn't cut your nails on a Sunday or a Friday for some reason she didn't know, then she extended it to Wednesday's too; an old saying she stood by was, "Stir with a knife, you stir up strife"; if she gave anyone a new purse it always had to have some money in it - so they would always remain friends forever. When a new carpet was put down she would put a few coppers under it, "Then we'll never be broke will we?" she would say.
No doubt there's some long lost folk meaning to them all and I'm sure mother picked up a lot of them from her mother. One I'm pleased she didn't carry on with was in regards to tea and dinner service sets. Upstairs here we have all my grandmothers odds and ends. My bachelor uncle who dies some years ago was a good dart player and won a lot of prizes for it. Many such prizes were tea and dinner service sets. When Jan and I started to go through them we found that there was always one piece missing. By this time mother was in a care home suffering with advanced dementia and we rarely get anything at all from her, so trying to ask why the bits were missing is impossible.
Another of my uncles and his family moved into the house next door to us about 5 years after we moved in here. Well, uncle Jack and aunty Phil died some years ago and only cousin John was left there. The house was far too big for him so he sold up and moved away but before he left he took me in and asked if I wanted any of the masses of china he had in the kitchen. As I told him, we had loads of it too from gran so I suggested that sell it. "Nope, no-one wants it. There's a piece missing from every set and buyers only want complete sets. One of mother's daft ideas of breaking one piece of every set so she would have bad luck." So we are not the only ones with this one.
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