Most of you who will have met me at one time or another will invariably accept my suggestion that I am not in any way paranoid. I am not conspiratorially minded nor am I of the propensity to imagine for a minute that I am not in control of my life.

I do not believe in luck, a point I have made to you many many times through the auspices of this fine family publication. However, hopefully without appearing to be contradictive of my own statements, I do have to accept that things often occur that appear to possess more than a hint of fortune about them.

Is there a difference between luck and fortune? In my opinion luck is something that supposedly happens completely out of the blue. However, nothing happens just out of the blue. In sport it is regarded as good luck, or bad luck depending on ones situation, if a ball bounces in a certain direction. A Rugby ball for example, can change direction in a instant and be very instrumental in winning or losing a game, but this is not down to luck.

It is down to the shape of the Rugby ball which was created to create creative situations for good Rugby players to take advantage of, and isn't it usually a creative Rugby player who has kicked the ball into that most opportune area for his team mate to be able to take decisive advantage of the "lucky" bounce.

In football a shot that propels a football against the inside of the goal post and right across the goal line creates a moment of good luck if it just barely creeps across the line, or bad luck if it hits the other post and pops back into the goalies arms. The truth of the matter of course is that it is the accuracy, or lack thereof, contained in the original shot that dictates whether the aforementioned football should cross the line or not.

Luck is more often than not used as a tool for excuse or to explain something the ill informed find unexplainable. This mentality in my opinion, means that luck is a concept or a thought process that emanates from the heart as it is simply a further connotation of the desire housed in each one of us for success, and especially those of us who do not really understand how to achieve success.

Fortune on the other hand, is a much more subtle. If I propose to you that fortune is a product of the mind and therefore a force that can be created to aid the search for success you may think me odd. Surely luck and fortune are siblings, peas from the same pod, if not identical twins.