SOME rely on a lucky shirt or boots; others won’t change their socks while they are on a win­ning streak; and the most famously superstitious of them all will insist that his water-bottles be aligned in perfect order. In Writing’s on the Wall (Radio 4, Tuesday of last week), the sports psychologist Martin Perry explored the rituals under­taken by elite ath­letes in pursuit of the flawless per­form­ance. This is how they achieve equanimity, we are told. Or, others might argue, this is the way to wind up your opponent.

Rafael Nadal is notorious, obses­sively bouncing the ball before each serve and spending inordinate amounts of time arranging his kit. But, as the competitors interviewed here at the Grand Prix indoor athlet­ics event in Glasgow revealed, this is pretty much a universal phe­nom­enon.

And lucky charms are transfer­able: the Spurs striker Clive Allen told of how the Argentinian legend Diego Maradona re­­quested to bor­row the lucky boots that had earned Allen the club goal-scoring record.

That Perry happily talked of ritual and superstition as if they were synonymous prompts an interesting question about the interdependence of the two. Nadal’s ball-bouncing may have originated in practical ne­ces­sity, developed into a mind-sharpening ritual, and finally taken on a metaphysical significance. Solv­ing the question where one stops and the other starts, in the words of Philip Larkin, “Brings the priest and the doctor In their long coats Run­ning over the fields.”

Priest and doctor might equally be attracted by the challenges posed by the music of John Cage. In Sunday Feature: John Cage, Zen and Japan (Radio 3, Sunday), Robert Worby traced the origins of Cage’s notori­ous 4'33", consisting entirely of silence. Or, to be more specific, con­sisting of no pre-determined sound. To demonstrate the impor­tance of this clarification, we heard how 4'33" might have sounded in Cage’s apart­ment: a cacophony of traffic, sirens, and people.

Indeed, “the high priest of silence” doesn’t seem to have believed in silence at all. His visit to an anechoic chamber in Harvard — at that time thought to be the quietest place on earth — made him aware of the noises that one’s body makes when all external stimuli are removed.

Silence, for Cage, was a means by which random sound could be truly liberated from organised composi­tion, and, by implication, music lib­er­ated from the ego of the com­poser.

It was a revelation to hear that made little impact when first per­­formed by David Tudor in 1952, to an audience primarily of New York Philharmonic subscribers on vaca­tion. Only in the 1960s did Cage’s admirers — and Cage himself — identify the work as the essential first movement in a process of mu­­sical (de-)composition which en­­tailed far greater outrages against received musical wisdom than this period of silence.