Fiday the 13th

Well, as most of you should already know, I am not a superstitious person. In fact, I am probably the opposite of having triskaidekaphobia - instead of being afraid of Friday the 13ths I rather enjoy them. I look forward to them with a kind of childish anticipation that maybe something spooky and unexplainable will happen. It is probably a good thing, though, that I have never experienced anything truly spooky on any of the Friday the 13ths I can remember. If I was superstitious, though, I'm sure I would have been freaked out by some of the events of the latest Friday the 13th.

I had decided to travel up to Mum and Dad's for the weekend so I was driving up the Midlands on Friday afternoon. I was thinking to myself that it was a rather beautiful day to be driving because it was so blue and sunny when quite suddenly I drove into heavy rain - it was suddenly dark, cold, wet, and much more like a Friday the 13th. So I turned up the volume and started singing along to some of my favourite songs. A couple of songs later (still in the rain) the back speakers just stopped working and suddenly there was only sound coming from the front of the car (I have it balanced so that most of the volume comes from the back speakers). I thought "Bother! I'm going to have to do something about that when I get home" and turned up the volume so I could continue singing along. Some of my friends who are superstitious would have freaked out at this point and begun to blame it on the paranormal - actually, I don't think that they would have been brave enough to travel to begin with.

A couple of songs later, I was still driving along in the dark and the cold and the rain, singing along to keep myself entertained when the back speakers suddenly decided to work again. Because I had turned the volume up so much, I nearly got my ears blown out, and was more than a little startled. After quickly turning down the volume and regaining my composure I was rather delighted that I wasn't going to have to do anything about fixing my speakers after all. My superstitious friends, if they hadn't already pulled over and given up on the idea of driving north, would, at this point, be extremely freaked and would have started the lookout for zombies and aliens and be blubbering incoherently.

A couple of songs later, the rain was suddenly over and it was sunny, blue, and warm again. The temperature according to Barry rose quite suddenly from the 10 degrees it had been in the rain back up to the 29 degrees it was in the sunshine and my Friday the 13th experience was over.