Bird strike on the back of my jacket this morning; happened whilst I was hurrying through the park en route to the Tube this morning. Could have done without that. Hardly anything on me to clean it off with either, just a few frayed fragments of tissue I found scrunched together in a coat packet, but you work with what you have.

There's the faintest stain visible, the kind of thing you'd really only see if you held it up in raking sunlight; I'm thinking of it as scar tissue

Still an impromptu, uninvited dollop of guano is supposed to be lucky.

Luck is an interesting notion. As someone who possesses an atavistic, primitive awe of anything remotely superstitious, I used to expect the day to change in alignment with whatever hex it was, or abracadabra I'd triggered: walk under a ladder things would go one way, chance on a four leaf clover, everything would have gone swimmingly.

But the problem with superstitions, and I know this because sheer rationalism tells me this, is that all they do is promote passivity. You wait for things to happen. You wait and wait and wait... and then wait a bit more.

It is incomparably more worthwhile, to go out there and create your own luck, than to have done what I would have done in my pre-enlightenment days - submit irrationally, and I have to say obstinately, to the delusion that a string of bird shit slapping on to the back of your coat would conjure up a life change.

The only thing a bird strike changes is the complexion immediately around whatever it is, it's hit.