The advice industry

I'm part of the advice industry now, that section of it which helps with "how to live your life". Pretty lethal, eh? Wrong advice could wreck the recipient's life or at least waste precious time. Rigorous standards are needed to curb the unconsidered foolishness of ministers of religion, therapists, coaches, gurus of all kinds.

Of course such people have to exist, by popular demand. But the public should beware. Please, please for your own good apply these criteria and make sure your advisor shapes up.

1) Only one kind of advice should ever be given: "Be who you are".

2) The advisor must follow up outcomes and side-effects - honestly!

3) The advisor who says that outcomes are unmeasurable, or claims that the advice is harmless, or that it has always worked, is unworthy and should be forbidden to practise!

After these ponderous thoughts, I took time off and renovated this old lamp. Pim (the man who was not, as I eventually discovered, my father) brought it from Java as a present for my grandfather in about 1936, where it sat beside him in his study, begrimed with pipe smoke, for perhaps forty years. The other day I retrieved it, and put the charity lampshade on it. I'd always known this old man and his dog (?) as having one eye each. Fixing them up with binocular vision seems to be my most satisfying achievement today.

Talk

I have to give a talk in a few days. Will anyone turn up? I have sent some invitations to experts in a closely-related field. Will they patronise me or try to put me down, for poking my barely-trained nose into their territory? How extempore can I dare to be? I don't feel like planning it too much, and yet I know that between now and then I will feel so uncomfortable about it that I will have to produce some notes on paper.

Here are some of those flowers that come out in the time of tulips. Oh, what are they called? How could I forget? "Forget-me-not!"

Spring (1)

Spring is the most important thing happening here. This is how far a chestnut blossom at the back of the house has progressed. I'll give you an update soon.

I love Spring, this year particularly, because it mirrors my own joy. Someone offered me this link on cheerfulness. (Warning: it is a .pdf file) I can't decide if it's wise or inane. Certainly it contains plenty of common-sense and folk-wisdom. But the man is a therapist and this is a prescription for the attainment of cheerfulness. I don't suppose he has run a trial on its effectiveness and any harmful side-effects.

Do I have an immortal soul?

Looking that mackerel in the eye, and doubting its immortality, and accepting the procession of evolution from fish-like ancestors to me, was another nail in the coffin of my own belief in my own immortality.

I should add that to me, religion has no authority whatsoever in the matter. For sixty years the idea of God and the immortal soul have been central to my understanding of life, if only vaguely. I have never been a Christian. Even as a child, sent to church twice on Sundays, I did not believe that Jesus died for me.

But religion nevertheless remained a major preoccupation and I recall when I was 16 being accosted by my maths master in the street when I had just returned from the public library. He asked what books I was carrying. They were the Analects of Confucius, the Yoga Sutras of Patanjali and a commentary on St John's Gospel. "You are a seeker," he said. It had not occurred to me till then.

Illustration: a lampshade of beads and shell buttons, which I found in a charity shop.

Do fish have souls?

Does a fish have a soul? I was gutting a mackerel the other day and I did not like the way it looked at me. Like me, it had a heart and a spine and guts. Its gills were a brilliantly efficient way of oxygenating its blood. As a living creature, rather than this defrosted corpse, it was a stunning piece of functional design.

At its moment of death, did its soul escape and go somewhere? Is a fish really different from me? If a fish has no soul, then where and how in the procession of evolution did a soul first enter a body?

Let us not forget that every generation has needed explanations. Soul has served us well. Am I right in thinking that if soul is cut out of our beliefs, just as I slit the mackerel's belly and removed its innards, then goodbye religion, goodbye New Age, goodbye God?

Are we ready to ditch soul? Shall we hold a Requiem Mass, not for the soul of the departed, but for the departure of soul?

To the reader

The experiment is not just a technical one. It may be fact or fiction, but covers anything that this author chooses; until you, dear reader, exercise your power to comment, and then you may influence the agenda.

I'm not selling anything and remain anonymous. Nothing is promised but honesty, which may come in the disguise of certain fictions, or other games. If no other reader ever comes along but you, that's fine. I don't plan to tell anyone about this place. I'm content if it's known only to you and me.