IT’S ALL RELATIVE

By Caro Cooper -

As a kid, I never liked sleeping over at friends’ houses. This is not unique to me, I know. But I never liked it because all my friends’ families were weird. Or at least, different from mine. They watched kid-friendly movies, didn’t have strange names for their genitals, didn’t have a chocolate cupboard stocked full with teeth-rotting treats and, most notably, they weren’t deeply superstitious.

In my family, it was sacrilege to say you did well on a test at school. You had to come barrelling through the front door screaming about how poorly you did. If we said a positive word about our efforts, my mother would hush us and tell us not to jinx it. We were a house of super-nerdy kids who always did well enough, but the fear of failing through confidence was imprinted early. We also weren’t allowed to watch our dogs or cat eat because my mum said it upset them. When the cat started tucking in, we all tiptoed out of the room.

Thanks to years of expensive therapy, I’ve been able to leave most of these oddities in the past. I can refer to my vagina as such, rather than as a ‘ujakapibby’, which is what I believed it was called for far too long. Even so, though I may have made some progress, there is one superstition I cannot leave behind.

In my family, whenever an ambulance passes, whether you’re in the car, on foot or at home, you must hold your collar