I counted five different magpies standing all by themselves when I went running this morning.

This really bothered me, because even a single, single magpie is supposed to be a sign of bad luck, but I see them everywhere in London these days.

As an anxious to please sort of person – I even hate to offend those roadside boards that smile or look sad at you depending on your driving speed – it seems I am forever mouthing: ‘Good morning, Mr Magpie’ at some unaccompanied bird, somewhere.

Then, so as not to cause further offence if the magpie happens to be a girl, or a feminist (a feminist magpie?), I hastily add ‘Ms Magpie’.

You see, I really don’t want to bring down bad karma on my head by saying the wrong thing. But then again, I do find doing the right thing all the time a tad exhausting.

My mum told me it was unlucky to see a single magpie because they mate for life. A single bird, then, is either one whose partner has died or who hasn’t found love yet – and no-one wants that type of luck passed on to them.
  

Yet, as I plodded round and round the park, seeing more and more magpie singletons, I couldn’t help thinking that this old wives’ tale seems to fly (ahem) in the face of the evidence.

If they really are gagging for long-term commitment, why were there so many standing around on their own?

Maybe what’s happening is that some magpies don’t like always being joined at the hip and need a bit of time for themselves, so they fly off to another part of the park for a while, to clear their heads away from the old man/woman.

Coincidentally, as I write this, ‘November Rain’ is playing on my computer and Axl Rose is making the same point: “Everybody needs some time on their own/Don’t you know you need some time all alone?”

But what if some other magpies – a smaller subset still, this, and an even more nonconformist group – just didn’t want to be in a couple at all? What if they just want out of their stifling relationships?

My guess is that this would be a pretty bold step for a magpie to take, given the way they tend to look at things in, erm, black and white in the magpie fold. These are birds that should seek happiness only within a mating for life scenario, full stop.

Worse still, any magpie thinking of leaving his or her partner would also have to consider what sort of reaction they would get outside their own community.

As I ran, I imagined a comedy sketch where a giant magpie consults a therapist - which I thought it would be funnier if both were obviously actors in deliberately rubbish costumes, with cut-out circles for their faces, underneath unmoving false magpie heads, beaks and glassy eyes.

The first magpie wipes her face with a tissue sticky-taped to her wing by some behind-the-camera production person, and explains to the therapist exactly what stops her from leaving her partner.

“I would just make everyone unhappy”, she moans.

“I’d make him unhappy – think of the shame of it for him. My parents would be devastated. His parents would be devastated.

“But that’s not all. I couldn’t show my beak in public if I left him.

“Everywhere I went and a human saw me, I know I would be making them miserable, too. All that ‘two for joy, one for sorrow’ stuff. It’s doing my head in.”

“But is all that really worth making yourself unhappy for?” the therapist replies. “You have to do what makes you happy; you can’t live your life for other people.”

“All that ‘one for sorrow, two for joy’ stuff is – to put it bluntly, their shit ,” the shrink continues, and mimes picking up an invisible box, holding the tips of her wings parallel in front of her, about a foot apart. Then she mimes putting the box down a wing’s length away and turns back to the other magpie: “You really do have to try and put all that to one side.”

It was just an idle thought. I wasn’t going to act upon it.

I mean, how could I? I just got carried away after a good game of football.

But for just a moment at the weekend, I did contemplate making a Faustian sort of pact with my five-year-old son’s life in return for a couple more years of footy.

I should explain. I have been reborn – in footballing terms at least.

After playing Sunday League stuff for more than 20 years, I began to notice how young and fit the opposition was, and how they outpaced me to every ball. Actually, the only thing about me advancing quickly was my bald patch.

Middle aged spread – reinforced by an exercise regime that involved long hours standing around in parks, anxiously waiting for my toddlers to fall off their first climbing frames and roundabouts – was setting in. So I gave up the game.

Until last season, when a neighbour mentioned he played in a Wednesday five-a-side game with some other 30 and 40-somethings, some of whom played 11-a-side football for a veterans’ team on Saturdays.

Hmmm…veterans’ football. The prospect of competing on level terms, against similarly no-paced and follically challenged old men, had a strange appeal. Or at least it was more inviting than chasing spotty, skilful teenagers who called ‘Catch you later, baldy!’ as they nutmegged me and sped away with the ball.

Once among the half-dead (statistically at least) men, I originally intended taking up my usual centre-back berth but, having failed to displace the 49-year-old incumbent, found myself farmed out to increasingly strange and exotic positions: right back, left back, then finally – in a pinch – left midfield!

And lo! Despite being in my 44^th year, despite standing an impossibly lanky six feet six inches tall, and despite a singular lack of ball skills, I was reborn as a tricky winger.

And that is where the trouble started. 

At the weekend, again playing at left midfield, I scored the first goal in our 6-0 (six-nil!) win and had – or at least I thought I had - a stormer.

Not only did I notch. I overlapped – nay marauded – down the left, caused havoc with my flick-ons from long-throws, came infield to make important tackles, closed people down, and even showed my versatility by slotting in late on at centre back to ensure a humiliating nixing for the opposition.  

I played so well that even the cliché ‘he played out of his skin’ was inadequate. In fact, I was so good that I played out of my boots, realising near the end that the sheer power of my running, the swiftness of my feints and turns, had split my left boot near the sole. The technology just could not contain me.

Which is why I ended up in a shop I shall call SportsBarn on Sunday, thinking evil thoughts about my son.

He needed a pair of football shorts for school; I needed boots. So we repaired to one of those aircraft hangar-like, out-of-town stores that piles sports gear all the way up to their five metre ceilings and always have a sale on.

Once there, I quickly found some cheap boots (at my age, there’s no point buying expensive ones, I reflected gloomily) but, despite the slew of kid-sized replica kits from The Premier League, La Liga, Serie A, the Eredivise etc., we found it hard to find shorts small enough for a five year old.

I thought, fondly, paternally, how Alex was still just a bit young for the football-mad stage of boyhood, and almost wished he was a couple of years older so we could leaf through all those exotic shiny strips together. Father and son.

And that was when the devil on my shoulder proposed the wicked, impossible, yet utterly seductive bargain: “If your son was two years older then he could give those two years to you,” the devil whispered. “Then he’d be seven, at that football-mad stage you love, and you would have two more years of football in you.”

“He doesn’t need those two years as badly as you do – he’s not going to use them to play football, anyway.”

Just for a matter of seconds, I so wished that I could make that deal. Twenty-five years after A-level English, I suddenly understood how Michael Henchard must have felt when he sold his family for five guineas in The Mayor of Casterbridge.

I don’t know what came over me. Hubris, I suppose; the sweet memory of one good game casting a misleading golden glow over my years of sporting non-achievement.

Or maybe it was the fevered atmosphere of the SportsBarn sale; all those chavs snapping up their reduced England shirts and jogger bums, and circling the cut-price trainer displays like hungry sharks around a bleeding seal.

Perhaps it was the unnatural electric crackle in the air made by hundreds of shell-suited people rubbing up against racks groaning with still more nylon and Polyester.

Or maybe I was getting off on the slightly dirty feeling you get by coveting all that cheap produce made under (how can I put this diplomatically?) ethically questionable working conditions abroad. Maybe I just wanted to feel bad about myself: to sink even lower morally, so low that I even considered carving two years from my son’s life to give me a facsimile of eternal youth.

Then, finally, after what seemed like a long time, I recoiled from the thought. “It’s vampirish! Ghoulish!” I told myself. “It’s worse than Shannon Matthews’ mum – at least she only drugged her and hid her for the reward money and used her family allowance to buy booze and fags.”

But what really killed the vile deal for me was not moral indignation but mathematics. I worked out that taking two years away from my age would only make me 41 – and that is hardly the basis for an extended football career, now is it?

And as if I wasn’t feeling low enough already, standing there in SportsBarn, fingering small boys’ nylon shorts, all at once I realised how truly old I was.

I realised that I was into scary big numbers now… numbers it is impossible to extract oneself from without pain - like a rampant credit card bill, a debt to a loan shark wielding a baseball bat, or Alasdair Darling’s projected national debt.

What could I do but accept it? The numbers didn’t lie. I would just have to suck up the fact that I was old...unless…

Unless, like Alasdair, I borrowed big, and took ten years of Alex’s life instead!

Sod morality. Sod everything. I could even handle living with a teenager if it meant I was 33 again!