Last Monday I got up and put my pants on back to front.

This was a deliberate act. A premeditated and calculated manoeuvre.

One which I deploy, only when absolutely essential.

I’m not a superstitious type. I’m really not. Not anymore at least. It’s just the pants thing that’s left. That’s all. Honestly.

There was a phase when I was in adolescence, when I had all manner of ridiculous rituals.

Touching furniture in the right order, eating my food in a particular way, running up the stairs to get to the top before the lounge door swung shut.

That was a good one. You wouldn’t believe the catastrophic fate that awaited me if I failed to get to the landing before I hear the crunch of the door shutting downstairs.

So terrible were the consequences that it’s strange that I can’t actually remember what on Earth they were today.

Thank goodness I made it. I fear I wouldn’t be here to tell the tale otherwise.

The touching furniture thing was a right pain in the neck too. It took forever to get out the door some nights.

The fact is of course, as everybody knows, that it’s all nonsense.

It’s blindingly obvious that what particular order I touched the furniture in Watford in 1970 made no difference to anything in the world ever.

But the point is that that’s not how it feels. Those pants had to go on back to front this week. I couldn’t live with myself otherwise.

It all started with a game of football I played for Oxhey Falcons, yes, the legendary Oxhey Falcons, when I was 13.

We played a particularly tense game of football against our arch rivals Sellotape United. Now that’s a particularly absurd name for a football club I know but that’s what they were called.

I’m guessing it’s something to do with the Sellotape factory but I’ve no idea. Do they even have Sellotape factories?

Anyway we actually won this game and when I was changing later on I realised I’d been wearing my shorts back to front.

And yes, you’ve guessed it, every week after that, I had to play every game with my shorts on back to front for fear that departure from this ludicrous practice would jinx the team.

So on the day last week that we, that’s Colchester Arts Centre, were due to hear back from government about whether our application to the Cultural Recovery Fund had been successful or not I had to take action.

Never let it be said, gentle readers, that when the chips are down, when things are looking bleak, when events conspire to place the team under threat or when indeed there comes a time for one brave soul to step forward, for one brave soul to make a stand, that I will shirk in this solemn duty.

When push comes to shove comrades, Dr Roberts can always be relied upon to put his pants on back to front.

Well it worked. Thanks goodness.

Nothing to with the many hours the whole team put into composing the application, the meticulous care, the anxiety, the sweat, the desperate consequences of failure that gripped us and drove us on.

And everything to do with underwear reversal.

Makes you think doesn’t it.

If only more people were prepared to make this selfless sacrifice, if the whole world just woke up one day and we all collectively wore are undergarments back to front?

Well it just might well be a better world in which we all live.