HERE’S a quiz for followers of this column: what do I have in common with the sinking of the Titanic, the Hillsborough stadium tragedy, an Air China fatal crash and the death of Abraham Lincoln?

Answer: all these awful events happened on my birthday, April 15 – along with the deaths of several entertainment legends including Tommy Cooper, Greta Garbo, Arthur Lowe, Joey Ramone and Kenneth Williams.

Incidentally, the date is also notable for the births of Jeffrey Archer, Samantha Fox and Leonardo da Vinci.

But I’m staggered by the number of terrible things that have happened on this day throughout the ages.

A quick trawl of the internet showed April 15 was also the date of: The Belfast Blitz in 1941 in which the Luftwaffe killed 1,000 people; massacres in Cambodia in 1970 which resulted in 800 bodies flowing down the Mekong River; a disastrous earthquake in 1979 on the Montenegro Coast; the shooting of a US plane in North Korea resulting in 31 deaths in 1969; volcanic ash in Iceland leading to the closure of airspace over most of Europe in 2010.

The list goes on and on. There are some good things on it of course. It was the date in 1923 that insulin first became available.

Also, on April 15 1802, William Wordsworth saw a ‘long belt’ of daffodils, inspiring the poet to pen I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud.

And the McDonald’s fast food chain dates its founding to April 15 1955, when the first franchise opened in Illinois.

Naturally, every egocentric would be interested in the happenings on their birth date, but I defy anyone else to find as much historic disaster than this.

It all leads me to question my long-held belief that the theory behind the signs of the Zodiac is nonsense. I have consistently enjoyed laughing off the idea that our personalities are based on the movements of planets.

A couple of weeks ago, though, I was joshing with staff on the subject and made someone read out everyone’s horoscope. But when it came to mine, the prediction sounded unerringly accurate, and was laced with a warning about the coming Saturday.

As cynical as I am, it left me a bit worried and I spent the ensuing Saturday looking over my shoulder. Luckily, nothing significant occurred.

Now I have no idea why so many rotten things happen on April 15, but at least last Friday’s date appeared to pass without incident.

In fact, I had a nice birthday, spent entirely in High Wycombe, culminating in an Indian restaurant gratuitously playing Stevie Wonder’s Happy Birthday over the loudspeakers in my honour.

But if the truth be told, I shouldn’t really have been born on April 15. In fact, I shouldn’t have been born at all.

A few years ago, I learned that my mother had problems during her pregnancy with me. Indeed, when she visited the doctor, she was emphatically told she had lost the baby.

Despite this, I still arrived, defying medical opinion. So did the doc just get it wrong or was there a more sinister supernatural explanation, as many of my critics would no doubt have you believe?

Lucky then that my hair is so thick and bushy, because there’s no chance of anyone finding a 666 under that thatch.