LUCKIEST MAN ALIVE??

Yesterday I told you about Tommy Allsup. But there's another man alive today who has been so lucky that it's hard to believe. There's a part of me thinks this simply can't be true, but it seems to be, so I'm going to tell you.

He's called John Woods.

(Actually, after the post yesterday, several of you came up with some others stories of amazingly lucky people. Check out Franko Selek and Maryanne Bruce. No one guessed the correct answer so I get to keep the prize - hehe! On the other hand, lucky blog-follower Vanessa O'Loughlin won yesterday's free draw, so she will receive a signed copy very soon. Well done, Vanessa! Everyone else - next draw Sat May 1st.)

Back to John Woods. In 1988, he was booked on the Pan-Am flight which exploded over Lockerbie, killing everyone on board. But he cancelled at the last minute because someone had persuaded him to go to a party in his office.

In 1993, he was on the 39th floor of the World Trade Centre when it was bombed, but he survived, uninjured.

On September 11th, 2001, he left his office in one of the Twin Towers. Seconds later, one of the two planes involved hit the building in the appalling tragedy which shook America and changed the world. John Woods was safe again.

I wonder how many days go by when he doesn't say to himself, "What if?" But you could go crazy thinking like that - so I hope he locks it away in a small place in his mind and focuses on the fact that he simply is a very, very lucky man.

What has this to do with Wasted? Well, one of the two main characters, Jack, is obsessed by stories like this. Jack has lost two mothers. The first one died giving birth to him - a blood clot, terribly bad luck, quite unpredicted and very rare. The second time was rather horrible, and Jack was there too, aged five - he'd just come home from his first day at school and an incredibly unlucky accident in the kitchen, "caused" by Jack, killed her. I'd rather not tell you about it here - it really is rather shocking...

Anyway, although he moves forward and grows up strong and seemingly undamaged, he does have this obsession about luck, good and bad. He covers his wall with stories of people who have horribly bad luck because they happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time. Like Aeschylus, who is supposed to have died when a tortoise fell on his head! Jack believes that if he throws himself at the mercy of luck, by letting a coin rule his actions, luck will look out for him.

John Woods made a decision which saved him from being on the Pan-Am flight and another that saved him from dying in the Twin Towers. He didn't know he was making an important decision, but it was a decision all the same.

Jack thinks if he makes the right decisions, he will be lucky. But how will he know what the right decisions are? He thinks he knows. He thinks that the only important decision is to spin the coin and follow the answer. But he's going to discover that he's wrong...

I'll be asking for YOUR stories of lucky escapes or chance events on May 4th. So, get thinking. I'm going to collect them all and I might tell them when I do school events and other talks. I want examples of how a tiny chance event affected your life - lucky escapes or unlucky actions, being in the wrong or right place at the right time, how your parents met etc, anything where you believe important results came from a tiny chance happening or decision. Don't tell me now - wait till I post the piece on May 4th. (For soome examples, see the page at the top of this blog, titled Your Chance Events.

Thing is, sometimes we have lucky escapes and don't even know - like Lorenzo in Wasted. Whether he dies in a car crash or not depends on whether he's driving a red car or not, which affects whether a pigeon crashes through a window when he's drinking coffee ... Sounds unlikely? Well, the pigeon scene actually happened to me. I'll tell you about it on Thursday. 

See you tomorrow, when I will have a writing competition for you - a chance for adult writers and school-age writers. If you're at school, tell your English teacher today - this is going to be a great chance for you to demonstrate your creativity and have a chance to be published here.

Meanwhile, comment below! And may you have a very lucky life.