I appear to have developed something of a minor obsession with magpies.

I can pretty much pinpoint the moment this happened, which would have been sometime in the early Nineties when I was in a car with several mates on our way to a holiday cottage in North Yorkshire we had hired for the weekend.

We passed a lone magpie by the side of the road and my friend said to me: “You have to ask after its missus.”

“Why?”

He shrugged. “You just do. If you see a magpie on its own, you have to ask after its missus. To stop the bad luck.”

This, I surmised, related to the old rhyme about magpies, one for sorrow, two for joy, three for a girl and four for a boy, and all that.

When I was growing up, the rhyme was known to me only as the theme tune to the children’s teatime show called, strangely enough, Magpie.

Magpie was the ITV alternative to Blue Peter and was presented by – I thought for a long time – Kevin Keegan. It wasn’t actually Kevin Keegan, but a chap called Mick Robertson who had Kevin Keegan-style hair. Then again, half of the country had Kevin Keegan-style hair.

Ever since then, I have exhibited a rabid fear of lone magpies. Whenever I see one, I shout: “How’s yer missus?” at it. This little obsessive-compulsive behaviour has mutated and evolved over the intervening years since that drive to North Yorkshire.

Firstly, and I’m not sure the provenance of this, but I shout “How’s yer missus?” in a voice that roughly approximates that of Arthur Mullard. If you didn’t get the Magpie reference, you certainly won’t know who Arthur Mullard was, so I suggest you ask a grown-up or resort to Google.

The second thing I have done is to add a little salute to the procedure. I read somewhere that this is the done thing, especially in the North-East of England, and it seems appropriate. Depending on where I am, though, the salute can differ. If I’m alone it will be a full-on military response to the presence of the lone magpie. If I’m in a busy place, I’ll kind of touch my fingers to my forehead. It still counts, though.

Thirdly, I often add to the “How’s yer missus?” line and hope that the magpie has healthy chicks. If you’re going to be polite to a bird, then there’s nothing wrong in going the whole hog.

Yesterday, I drove into work and I saw no fewer than three lone magpies at different stages of my journey. I followed all my procedures, but this filled me with a sense of dread and foreboding.

Because today is Friday the 13th. Are the magpies trying to tell me something? Have my little rituals been enough to ward off the bad luck?

We’ll have to wait and see...