IT happens every year, and every year I think of my mother.

This year it happened on Tuesday.

It was a bright, sunny morning and I was on the Adver’s new late shift, which meant I got up and did lots of chores and had a little ‘me time’ before work. Nonsense. It meant I had an extra hour in bed and when I got up, the world was brighter and sunnier than it normally is at 7.30am.

Clearly, spring is here and therefore it was going to be a relatively warm day so I eschewed the usual socks and boots in favour of a pair of summery slip-ons and bare tootsies.

By lunchtime it was freezing cold and pouring with rain and that was when I thought of my mother.

“Ne’er cast a clout before May is out,” she was saying in my head in her Brummie burr. And she’s not wrong.

Which set me thinking about all the other things our mums come out with through our childhoods which are delivered as fact but on closer inspection from the perspective of adulthood are rather more dubious.

Can you really get piles by sitting on damp ground?

Is it actually true that if you go out wearing a vest or other undergarment that has not been properly aired — and by that I mean rested in a warm airing cupboard for a couple of days after it has been dried — then pneumonia will be pretty much instant?

I’m also not entirely sure that if you spill salt and throw a pinch over your left shoulder it will go in the devil’s eye and keep you safe from harm.

A friend of mine has a theory that all our old dears went to some sort of training school for mums where they learnt this stuff as it seems to be common knowledge among a certain generation of women.

His mother believed if you dropped a knife and then picked it up with your left hand you’d get a nice surprise. She believed it to the extent that, being selfless (also part of the mums’ training programme) if she dropped a knife she’d leave it on the floor all day until the menfolk got home so one of them could pick it up and have the nice surprise.

She also insisted if you ate the pips of an apple, it would grow roots around your heart and give you a heart attack.

What’s interesting, of course, is that most of these motherly myths are designed to keep us safe. Keeping warm and dry and taking care when picking up knives is all pretty sound advice. These ‘mothers’ truths’ probably stem back to working class life well over 100 years ago, when cholera, diphtheria and other diseases were rife, and hygiene and warm, dry conditions really could save your life.

So ahead of Mother’s Day, I’d like to say thanks, Mum, for all the advice over the years, the daft and the sensible. And I certainly won’t be casting a clout again any time soon.

A few of my favourite things

MY fellow columnist Graham Carter mused on the disappearance of biscuit barrels, blotting paper, butter dishes and the like from his house over the years in his column this week.

He pointed out that over the years, our domestic lives have changed considerably and things once seen as essential are now firmly relics of the past.

What alarmed me, though, was of the 61 items he named, I own 31. I hope to make it 32 at some point when I inherit the mincer.

I still write with an ink pen and use blotting paper, I keep my butter in a butter dish and my umbrellas in an umbrella stand and I do indeed have a pincushion in the shape of a cactus which I knitted myself.

So all of this must mean I’m stuck in some sort of time warp. Which either makes me very odd or very trendy in a retro, ironic, hipster kind of way. I suspect it’s the former.

  • SO the odious, sanctimonious and shouty Jeremy Kyle has run off to Barbados to marry his children’s former nanny. I hope he sits himself down on national TV and gives himself a good shouting at. People in glass houses, eh, Jezza?