It could be worse...

I consider myself to be generally one of life’s unlucky people. It seems no matter what’s happening to me; whatever can go wrong does go wrong.

But it could be worse. I could be one of the people below who have suffered bad luck on a mental scale.

The Desarmes family: These poor buggers lived in Haiti. In January 2010 a magnitude 7 earthquake hit the country, causing catastrophic damage and killing somewhere between 100,000 and 366,000 people.

The Desarmes were among the lucky ones. They survived this disaster. They must have thought God was watching over them that day.

But their home was in ruins. The earthquake had reduced many buildings to rubble.

So, they decided to get away from this nightmare. They went to stay with their son in Chile.

In March, there was a huge earthquake in Chile. It destroyed their son’s house and they all found themselves sleeping in his garden.

I can’t help thinking that when the ground started shaking that second time they must have looked at each other and said, “Oh, for fuck’s sake…”

Tsutomo Yamaguchi: 1945, Mr Yamaguchi visited Hiroshima. As he stepped off the tram, BOOM – an atomic bomb hit less than two miles away. Carnage ensued; death and destruction on a horrific scale. Yamaguchi-san suffered burst ear-drums and temporary blindness.

He spent the night in an air-raid shelter, and in the morning he went home. His home was in Nagasaki.

After taking a couple of days to recuperate from his ordeal, he went back to work. Sitting in his supervisor’s office, he regaled him with the terrible tale of his doomed business trip. His supervisor sat there, enthralled, as he told him all about the unholy super-weapon that had wrought such unimaginable devastation on Hiroshima.

Then he heard a horribly familiar noise as, just a couple of miles away, a second atomic bomb fell on Nagasaki. I’d like to think at that moment, he looked out the window and said, ‘You’ve got to be fucking kidding me…’

I once thought a bird had it in for me because I was shat on in the same place, two days in a row. Yamaguchi’s tale kind of puts it into perspective.

He survived, by the way. But I bet everywhere he went after that, people would grab their stuff and bugger off out of town, just in case.