WHEREVER Lady Luck lives, it is not in Selby.

That's nothing against my home town or the people who live there, you understand. It's just that she definitely doesn't live with me.

Although nothing too terrible seems to happen (everyone touch wood), I can't go anywhere or do anything without something going wrong and recently, it has become quite ridiculous.

Some of it, I admit, is more to do with my natural talent for dizziness.

Just the other day I ruined a romantic meal I was cooking by slicing my finger open and spurting blood puree over the peppers.

"Whenever we try and do anything romantic I always go and spoil it by being dizzy," I moaned. "I'm really sorry."

"Don't be ridiculous," my boyfriend assured me. "It's all in your imagination."

Two days later, we had literally just set foot out of his front door when I tumbled boob tube over wedges down his path.

Being a brave little soldier (and too embarrassed to go back inside and face his parents ten seconds after leaving), I limped on from pub to pub until I couldn't dance, walk or even hop. We spent most of the next day in A&E.

Maybe I should be flattered that no one believes I was sober when I did it. After all, it would take someone pretty stupid to fall if they were, wouldn't it?

The last time we went away, I got out of bed, caught my toe in his bag and catapulted myself across the hotel room. The time before, I smashed my chin performing a similar manoeuvre on a mountain.

Less physical slip-ups included reading an entire book and wondering why it was called Lucy Diamond (turns out it wasn't; that was the author) and asking how you could tell football players apart when their tops were the same. I also found myself in Thailand, admiring the pretty basin I was washing my hands in, not realising it was a urinal. Yes, dizzy could be my middle name.

But some of it is just sheer bad luck. Take my holidays, for example.

In 2003, New York was cast into darkness in the biggest black-out for years. My friends and I were supposed to be at the airport flying home but instead, spent one night in a hostel basement and two more on an airport floor.

Last year, I went on a press trip to Poland specifically because they promised a free teeth whitening treatment. Having five fillings drilled instead, while in the midst of a rip-roaring hangover, had not been on the itinerary.

Closer to home, I took on an allotment with my colleague Haydn only for a tramp to bed down in the shed, defecate over the floor and give us fleas.

It came to a head a few weeks ago when my car rolled down a hill at Alton Towers and smashed into a tree. No, I wasn't in it and yes, the handbrake had been on.

But how do these things happen? Is it really dizziness that transforms me into a clumsy, loose-lipped wreck every time I leave the country, book into a hotel or enter good company?

Or maybe I'm just one of those people destined to trip, tumble and fall my way through life, just to give everyone else something to laugh about.

I'd like to say I was like Reese Witherspoon's character from Legally Blonde - a ditzy princess who totters to law school to win back her boyfriend only to realise she's a brain box after all - but I'd be lying.

Of course, my life is full of good fortune really. I've got a great family (most of the time), a lovely boyfriend and a job I enjoy.

Maybe glamour, poise and finesse will follow with age...