The second self-help book you've ever bought

(Originally posted on 28th August 2007)

I've been suffering from Booker overload. Writing a leaflet on the longlist and concocting ready-made quotes for the newspapers for shortlist day has prompted me to attempt to make some headway on the disparate heaps of non-fiction I've been stockpiling.

I've finally made a start on Waterlog by Roger Deakin, a proof copy of which has been slowly yellowing on my shelves for eight years. Synopsis: environmentalist and documentary maker living in a Suffolk cottage with a moat - please bear with me - conceives of swimming anywhere and everywhere in Britain where there's room for the breaststroke.

Deakin's profound knowledge of and love for nature makes him a fantastic guide to Britain's inevitably vanishing wilder locations. Essentially, it's a millennial restaging of William Cobbett's Victorian paean to a lost age, Rural Rides, minus the incipient racism.

I've always felt a claustrophobic discomfort in the water, but I do envy Deakin's ability to feel part of the shifting waterscapes of coasts and rivers, ancient and immovable yet restlessly kinetic. It's hard not to feel a twinge of loss when he tracks down a Fenland sinkhole in which for many years Baptists anointed their flock but is warned off further investigation by dire warnings from the Department of the Environment of leptospirosis and all manner of delinquent bacteria.

At a time when sparrows and hedgehogs have recently been designated endangered, it seems ever more urgent that we try to understand how human moulding of the landscape fundamentally skews ecosystems. Deakin laments that the banks of chalk streams are bought up by wealthy trout anglers when in France all land within twenty metres of a riverbank is public property. He stands vigil over a river diverted past a factory via a concrete channel.

But he's no misanthrope. The book is written literally from a frog's eye view but informed by a mind steeped in folklore and nature. As he drifts through the duckweed, exchanging curious glances with the newts, he is comforted by the amniotic quality of the water and it is a pleasure to imagine accompanying him on these eccentric field trips, listening to him point out the linnets and the blackcaps in grandfatherly tones.

Deakin died only last year - a great loss - but fortunately not before completing a second book, Wildwood, a comparable elegy to woodland and all manner of arboreal magnificence. My mother instilled in me a fascination with nature from a young age and I still remember racing through all her Gerald Durrells and leafing for hours through the twenty-part encyclopedia of animal life we kept on shelves in the hall. It is the wide-eyed wonder of passionate people like Deakin which is ever more vital at a time when schoolchildren are taken to city farms to encounter such exotic fauna as the cow and the pig, creatures which they are then horrified to learn are present in their packed lunches.

Anyway, I've inveigled both of Deakin's books to Front of House in the shop, Wildwood enjoying an Indian summer in New Titles and Waterlog crowbarred into the 'Other' section of Popular Biography alongside other unclassifiables such as Nietzsche's Ecce Homo and Pimp by Iceberg Slim.

There's been another upsurge in people asking for The Secret by Rhonda Byrne. For anyone fortunate enough to have had this pitiful excuse for an ISBN as yet pass them by, it's another of these manuals of positive thinking dressed up in pseudo-spiritual mumbo jumbo and shot through with moronic references to 'energy' and 'centredness'.

"Our job as humans is to hold on to the thoughts of what we want, make it absolutely clear in our minds what we want, and from that we start to invoke one of the greatest laws in the Universe, and that's the law of attraction. You become what you think about most, but you also attract what you think about most."

Thus writes John Assaraf, yet another Californian peddling a blend of basic common sense and scientific travesty. The whole book goes on like this, repeating the idea that visualising what you want to the exclusion of all negative thoughts will inevitably make those dreams come true. Want a flash car? Visualise it long enough and, so long as an image of some decrepit jalopy doesn't interpose, it's yours. Honestly, it's like cosmic ordering for dummies. Richard Dawkins may be an arrogant tosspot - and, boy, wasn't he just when I had what I had expected to be the privilege of meeting him last year - but frankly he sits on the fence too much for my taste. I'm not sure a full-on assault of pinpoint ratiocination is sufficient deterrent to these charlatans.

This week's Private Eye sends Dawkins up quite deliciously, having him harangue a woman for making a birthday wish:

"But how could blowing out candles on a cake have any influence over a future event? Isn't that just the most crude, primitive, infantile, unscientific superstition?"

Anyway, all this codswallop gives me another idea for a Christmas novelty title. It'll be called The Second Self-Help Book You've Ever Bought and every page will be blank, save one with the words 'You Mug' in an uncompromisingly bold typeface.

I should state at this point that I claim copyright on the concept and text, before Michael O'Mara Books add it to their illustrious roster of humour titles. (I came across the highlight of their September list today: Nosepicking For Pleasure.)

I really shouldn't write these posts while a police helicopter circles endlessly overhead like some sort of enormous luminescing mosquito. It has left me with an imbalance of the humours. I'm going to listen to Arcade Fire at mildly antisocial volume now and play 'air organ' on Intervention and My Body Is A Cage.