Mark Andrews: Suspicious mind? We can go on together

Well he would say that, wouldn't he? Think about it. You want to convince somebody you can read their mind, you can't really go wrong by accusing them of incredulity.

If they believe in you anyway, you're laughing. If they don't, you just say you detect a bit of scepticism and hey, presto, he's just read your mind.

As it happens, he turned out to be a very good mind reader. He correctly guessed the word I was looking at on the page of a book, and he identified my favourite colour. Green, since you ask.

But you hardly need to be Uri Geller to detect that I might occasionally lean towards the cynical point of view.

Maybe it's the result of a lifetime watching Aston Villa, but I do tend to have built up a reputation for being something of a suspicious old curmudgeon.

For example, during a Villa game last season, Villa were leading 1-0 at half-time after an uncharacteristically lively first-half performance.

"So what's your prediction for full-time?" asked the girlfriend.

"Liverpool to win 2-1."

You don't really need me to tell you how it ended up. Suffice to say, if only the Pools coupon were that easy.

Yet when my natural caution proved, for once, to have been unfounded a couple of months back, a colleague of mine suggested I needed a bit of PMA.

I didn't know blokes got that, was my first thought. But it transpires that PMA is not a biological condition but Positive Mental Attitude.

And the thing is, I am convinced that there is some PMA concealed somewhere beneath my world-weary furrow. The problem is, many people make the mistake of confusing a pragmatic wariness with an air of defeatism.

There is nothing worse than defeatism. We've all met them, slack-shouldered people who carry an air of despondency around with them, always looking like they are defeated before they've even attempted the task in hand.

But equally, those doe-eyed optimists who go through life without a care in the world are surely heading for a fall too?

Such people seldom make contingency plans.

Maybe if a former Chancellor of the Exchequer had not been so naïve to believe he had 'ended the cycle of boom and bust' he'd still be in office, and we would not be facing the crisis we are in today.

Whoops, a bit of politics creeping in there.

But to my mind a PMA is all about aiming high, but preparing for the inevitability that you will always be disappointed whatever happens.

"Fail to plan, plan to fail," as the old adage goes.

The trouble with that, of course, is that's usually delivered by those infuriatingly chirpy sorts with smiles straight out of the Colgate advert.

And those are exactly the sort of people who fail to grasp what it means in the first place. We've all seen them on Dragons' Den. Those über-confident types with generous lashings of hair gel, whose pitches are so polished they ought to be sponsored by Duraglit.

These characters effortlessly present spectacularly impressive returns. And then Duncan Bannatyne, asks why they have remortgaged their house for a project that is never going to work. Now there's a man with a PMA.

Perhaps the adage should be rewritten for the 21st century, but 'fail to plan for possible failure, plan to fail' probably wouldn't catch on. Or maybe that's me being sceptical again.

But let's just say if you go through life preparing for the worst, you will rarely be disappointed. And maybe, just occasionally, you will be pleasantly surprised.