Born With A Hat On

Apparently, I was a one-in-eighty-thousand birth, what the French term a né coiffé, meaning born with a hat on. According to my mum, and she should know, I was born with a caul, which is a thin translucent lining of the amnion covering a baby's head, so I must have looked like a nylon-stockinged infant bank robber being forcibly ejected from the Nat West. The thought always reminds me of the old Les Dawson joke – I was born so ugly, the midwife slapped my mother.

In mediaeval times, being born with a caul was a sign of good luck and it was considered an omen that the child was destined for greatness. Another popular belief was that being born with a caul would protect the child from death by drowning and cauls were therefore much prized by sailors, enabling mothers to sell them for large sums of money.

In 1850, Charles Dickens published David Copperfield, a novel in which the title character and narrator's opening lines were:

'I was born with a caul, which was advertised for sale in the newspapers at the low price of fifteen guineas.'

According to my handy on-line converter, this equates to £1250 today, a nice little earner at any time in history, although I never heard my mother say that she'd sold mine to a passing sailor. Perhaps the midwife bagged it as one of the perks of the job and immediately her shift was over jumped on the first train to Grimsby. We will never know.

Not everyone went for the good luck or never drowning angle mind you. The sombre Romanians thought that babies born with a caul would become strigoi at death. Strigoi in Romanian mythology would rise from the dead and turn into beasts that gain their energy from the blood of their victims; clearly the source of Bram Stoker's Dracula stories. This one has to be my favourite, as it could come in very useful when dealing with persistent cold callers or negotiating with double glazing salesmen....a did you know I was born with a caul and I've got your address, sort of useful.

I've recently discovered that I'm in rather esteemed company, a sort of eighty-thousand-to-one club, with luminaries including Lord Byron, Sigmund Freud, King James Vl of Scotland, George Formby and Liberace. Need I say more? Greatness achieved and not one of them drowned, so there may be something in these beliefs after all, although I'm not sure the Victorian poet Thomas Hood would agree. He ended his poem Sea Spell with the lines: Heaven never heard his cry, Nor did the ocean heed his caul.

It's very easy in this age of technology and science to dismiss popular mythology, but there's a little more to it than meets the eye. These beliefs are useful in so many ways. They pacify, they instil confidence, they supply convenient answers, they make us feel a bit different and above all, they can make you a bob or two. I lived for a while at the side of Loch Ness and believe me, popular myth can support whole communities. Up there they invented a myth and it's kept the cash registers humming ever since.

We don't leave hats on the bed or open umbrellas indoors. We avoid number thirteen and touch wood to ward away bad luck. We cross our fingers and put horse shoes above doors and if we break a mirror we sit in silence awaiting retribution. These are not the actions of rational people, but nevertheless, we are all guilty of swallowing the myth for one reason or another.

The answer surely, is that we like to comfort ourselves with superstitious belief and in many cases we're prepared to pay handsomely for it. I once paid twenty euros to kiss the Blarney Stone in Ireland. Now just think about that for a second. I paid to hang upside down from the ramparts of a castle and kiss a lump of limestone.....need I say more. Such belief can be so deep seated that we actually hand over our hard-earned for it, even though, at the final reckoning, we would acknowledge to idiocy of it all.

So, if you can make a few bob from an imaginary monster or persuading people to kiss a lump of limestone or flogging part of your amniotic sac to a sailor, then good luck to you, you're clearly much smarter than the rest of us.

For the record, I must confess to being lucky on several occasions and I have never drowned, but I'm still plugging away at the greatness. Still, as Napoleon once said, 'Two out of three aint bad'.......or was that Meat Loaf?