My trouble, though, is that as soon as I scrape the crap off my shoe I go and step in some more of it. I’m the kind of geezer who walks around a ladder to avoid the bad luck of walking under it, only for the painter to take a tumble and fall down on me, paint pot and all. I’m a right magnet for grief. In short, I’m a serial f**k-up.

Mind you, while I am often so deep in the mire that it’s threatening to clog up my left nostril, I always somehow manage to squeeze my way out of the ultimate dreadful conclusion of my impending disasters. I remember facing eviction once. I was clearing my stuff out and, tucked in the back of a drawer with the moth balls, I found a wad of money – not enough to solve my problems, you understand, but sufficient to turn the bailiffs from the door and buy me some time.

Four kids, two wives, two divorces – it’s the kind of scoreline you’d expect from Crystal Palace on a wet Saturday. That’s me, Martin Rogers. 30 something, still dreaming, still scheming, ducking and diving my way through life’s problems and religiously following that old motto about not letting the buggers grind you down.

"I ain’t ’aving that": That’s my motto in life. I hate it when I know someone is lying to me, trying to give me the right run around or just giving me a load of crap. I think to myself: "I know I’m right and I ain’t ’aving that".

It’s amazing the amount of people who will meekly accept the first and usually negative answer in response to a complaint or who just get intimidated by a shopkeeper or someone at customer services in Marks and Sparks. They catch someone stitching them up. It’s bang to rights but they let the b**tards off the hook because they don’t like to make a fuss. Well mate, I’m not that type of person, as you will quickly learn…

I honestly feel that I have a black cloud hovering directly above my head and that I’m doomed to suffer bad luck all along life’s highway, punctuating my progress like a progression of traffic lights stuck on red. If it’s going to happen to anyone, be sure it will happen to me. They say that bad luck comes in threes; well, in my case it comes by the dozen. I wonder if breaking a mirror really does mean seven years-bad luck? – if so I’ve got another two years still to go!