It was alarming to be given five copies of The Little Book Of Calm for Christmas. All right, so it's a nice category of present when you want to send something more than a card, less than a bottle of champagne and different to a poinsettia. And it's full of marvellous advice. But when you get five of them?
Suppose you got five copies of a book telling you how to improve your grasp of grammar, your accent, or How To Dress Younger? You'd have a bit of a think about it, anyway.
I had always thought I was too calm, almost sleepily calm, as it happens. Not really alert enough (insufficient quivering about the world, mellow to the point of rottenness about a lot of issues).
How odd to be seen as some kind of tense, clenched fist. But then, we have to face that others often know us a lot better than we know ourselves. I knew a woman friend was going to go back to the Walking Disaster she had left. I could see it in neon lights around her head, even though she couldn't.
We all knew a friend who got this great job in publishing would be out of it and in the middle of litigation in six months. He didn't know this, but all his friends did.
So maybe I'm actually a bag of nerves.
I read the book diligently and realised I don't spend any time just sitting and emptying my mind, like you should. I suppose I'm from the generation that thought an empty mind was bad, and you had to fill it and be busy, busy, busy - otherwise you were wasting your time here on earth. I'm either reading or writing or viewing or doing minimal, grim walking or even more minimal, superficial housework. Talking, phoning, eating, drinking, laughing, complaining, eavesdropping, inquiring, making soup, photocopying or falling asleep in the armchair. This is not a good way to be, apparently.
So I bought Paul Wilson's other book, Instant Calm, and studied the techniques, from Power Breathing to making yourself a stress ball with balloons and lentils which you keep squeezing and squeezing and that relaxes your muscles. Or a Guatamalan worry doll in a box and you lift the lid and whisper your worries to it each night and then they go away - your worries, that is. It's because you've transferred your anxieties.
Worry beads are good too, he says, and there's an exercise called Combing Your Fingers, which is just that: you take a comb and sort of, comb them. As you possibly would if you were a werewolf.
He is in favour of golf, and gardening and massage and nice oils and having a pet, and hugging people and wind chimes. All of which are great, I agree. In fact, the finger combing and the stress ball are probably fine too if you're in a state. They're certainly better than a bottle of vodka or a blazing row.
All that amazed me about it the unmerciful success of these books is not the content, which seems fine, but the huge need for it that has come upon the world.
What can have happened recently that made everyone clench their teeth, furrow their brows, overdose on caffeine, breathe in shallow gasps, speak in sharp, staccato bursts, and become impatient, bored and in a hurry all at the same time?
It seems only a very short time ago we were all reading Superwoman and Pursuit Of Excellence, and Achieve More, and You Can Do This and Empower Yourself To Do That and Go For The Burn. Did we do it too much or something: is it that the pendulum must now swing back?
I'm not at all qualified to know, because I believed that since I never bought the first package, I didn't need the second. But what do I know? I decided to lurk in a book shop and question the people buying calm-books. I even took a clipboard to make it seem more authentic.
The problem was, of course, that I knew some of the customers and they gave me hopeless answers to confuse me, but in the main I got a picture of people who wanted more peace in their lives and were quite prepared to find it in a book.
A lot of them agreed with what Paul Wilson says at the beginning of Instant Calm about the self-help industry and its boom in the past decade. "Average people of average motivation suddenly found that with a modicum of guidance they could transform themselves in ways which their grandparents would never have considered possible." That seems to be the clue to it all.
In answer to my scientific clipboard-study, people said that they had experience of a previous generation when people were meant to be unchangeable. There was always a great aunt in the past who was a nightmarish old grouch but everyone shrugged: that's the way she was.
Or a grandfather so busy working and trying to make a future for his family that he had no time to have any life with them.
Or a neighbour jangling his keys and drumming his fingers, looking at his watch, and everyone would say about him that it was sad but that's the way he was. People were born like that - jumpy, nervy - and they couldn't change.
Today people think they can change, and they want time to smell the flowers rather than be top of the tree. So they flock to buy books on how to do it.
A 20-year-old woman thought the books might advise her on how to cope with job interviews: apparently, she had been told she gave off nervy vibes. A middle-aged man said he had been passed over for promotion and that - though in his head he didn't given a damn, he had only five more years to work anyway - in his heart he did. Maybe the book might help.
A 15-year-old girl was getting the book as a class present for their teacher. The teacher had a shrill voice and a nervous tic so she needed it badly.
I thought about the teacher for while afterwards. Maybe she got five copies also.