Yes of course I want to do it. Tell people how to live their lives, fill them with my own inner certainty about how they should work out their futures.
I've been having a stab at it all my life in ways. But none of it seriously.
Like the time I was an astrologer for a weekly publication, when their astrologer went on strike due to unforeseen circumstances, but came back pretty sharpish when he saw what I was doing to his column .
I used to do a travel advice section on a radio programme in England which was mainly about telling listeners NOT to go to wherever they thought they might like. I know I prevented loads of people breaking their bones on the ski slopes and being burned to a crisp in resorts in high season but I was considered a bit negative and flip and the thing didn't really take off.
I helped a friend who was a great cook to do a cookery advice column but she got bored with people's sponges being flat and their scones being like bullets. I said she would struggle on because it was six pounds a week between us. But when she went away on a patisserie course, we were both sacked because my advice was so hopeless while she was gone.
I even tried an unasked for advice column in this paper, telling Bishop Casey to come back at once and write a book about Annie Murphy and give the royalties to Trocaire, and I also advised the Queen of England to abdicate in favour of her mother, but nobody did anything I suggested, so I got dispirited about that eventually.
Obviously I never cared about the whole thing enough to seek and take any professional training in all this. I have no qualifications in psychology, psychotherapy, anthropology, sociology. I have never worked as a counsellor, so why do I care so much about what other people do?
I would love to think it as an overpowering concern for my fellow creatures on this earth, but I think it's really an insatiable curiosity about how other people manage or don't manage whatever hand they have been dealt. As someone who has never hung up on a crossed line and who fell off a chair not long ago trying to hear what they were saying at the next table in a restaurant, I suppose I am obsessively interested in what some might consider the trivia of other people's lives.
I wondered if by trying to trawl as large a sample of human behaviour as possible I am hoping to teach myself how to live, but I don't think that can be true.
After all I KNOW what we should do in life, we should be optimistic cheerful and generous .
We should pick up the pieces and keep our dignity, but at the same time we should not get walked on nor become victims, and we must not be diverted from what seems just.
Yet I also think it is destructive, futile and time-wasting to seek revenge. Hours spent tring to get even can be wasted hours;
they would be better spent trying to get on with life. What I am not sure of is where the line is drawn in the sand.
If people have been betrayed, hurt and humiliated, how far should they go to restore self-esteem? Or should they go any distance at all? Is a mute acceptance and decision to forget the wrong actually a huge strength or just a pathetic weakness?
Having lived through a generation that wrote to magazines for a ruling on whether a French kiss was (a) a mortal sin, (b) a cause of pregnancy or (c) a surefire way of remaining unmarried all our lives, I have, to put mildly, seen a few changes and shifts of attitude.
A recent collection of the puzzled letters to Frankie Byrne complete with her no nonsense answers (Mentor, edited by Patrick O'Dea, price £4.99) will show you just how much has changed,
Frankie's husky voice advising dithering women who want their farmer fiances to get a job in the city that they should pick up their marbles and get out of the game seems light years away nowadays.
The country, or at least Frankie's constituency of it, throbbed with dysfunctional sons unable to challenge their mothers, and witless women driven mad by commitment-phobic men.
Her practical advice, which in all cases emphasised courage rather than conformity, was listened to with awe by those who would have found it as easy to walk on water as to buck the system and adopt the individualism and independence that Frankie Byrne preached and indeed practised.
But all the huge leaps forward for man and womankind have not meant that the problems have flown away with the extreme naivety and the massive national inferiority complex.
So, today's anxieties may not be about whether petting is a venial or a mortal sin, and how to get an elderly father to sign over the farm but anxieties and dilemmas still exist. They could be about the fear that one side of a relationship sees the future as short-term and heavily concentrated on sex while the other has more ambitions connected with building a nest and filling it with chicks.
Or about putting an elderly parent into care, about acknowledging or ignoring the obviously active sex life of teenagers, about the confused admiration that still exists for those who have cheated the revenue or social welfare.
In a volatile country where debate about absolute right and absolute wrong is spirited and ongoing there will always be strongly entrenched views and people who will never abandon their stance.
Yet even within this potentially unbending framework it is easy to see how attitudes have changed. Protectionist, near-racist views about immigrants were never part of our psyche when there were neither refugees nor immigrants.
It was easy then to be pure, incorruptible and critical of the behaviour of colonial neighbours.
Legislation for equality between the sexes has caused a sharp shift in opinion about the character of a woman who stays living with and silent about an unfaithful or violent partner.
Thirty, even 20, years ago in Ireland a woman who turned a blind eye to the behaviour of the breadwinner/patriarch was admired in a series of clucking comforting cliches for her reticence, tolerance, stoicism and refusal to rock boats, make waves or upset applecarts.
This woman appeared to notice, say and do absolutely nothing in the interests of preserving something. Preserving what?
The family, the neighbourhood, the reputation of the political party. And this was all considered totally admirable.
Yet today that same woman would be sharply criticised for not having had the guts to get up and leave. Nowadays they would ask what kind of role model is she for her children? She has taught them only to be victims.
And what if she knew or suspected that her husband's business was not entirely kosher? At the time she would have been praised for not being a whistle blower.
Today it is assumed that she stayed to share in the spoils, that she is guilty by association, that she possibly deserved the lonely life she had
This is of course not fair. She cannot be a heroine then and a villain now.
You can't be tried twice for the same crime under different jurisdictions and found innocent the first time and guilty the second. The past is indeed a different country in terms of tolerance, family maintenance and property.
But that is not to say that we have got it all sorted yet.
No matter how many changes there are in society it will never be easy to know the right course to follow at a time of bereavement deception, betrayal or indecision. In fact there may be far fewer certainties these days now that there are no squinting windows nor thought police to tell us where to turn.
The advisers, even those who DO have qualifications in this area, are also less certain about absolutes. They suggest routes rather than define paths. They act as the concerned friend, or the person on the next barstool on whom an entire life story has been downloaded rather than as People Who Know All the Answers.
More and more they admit that there may be more than one answer.
And this is what I have grown to believe in what I like to consider my maturity.
There was a time when it was all instantly clear what others should do but nowadays I have come to believe in alternative routes.
I don't now see this as fence-sitting, blandness and the awful whatever-you-think-yourself school of philosophy.
I still think I know the way to go for almost everyone on earth apart from myself but I am not only prepared to let others have their say about the issue, I actually think it's essential.
Any one person attempting to sort out situation for someone else comes to it with a whole agenda and background of attitudes which may in some cases prove totally inappropriate.
So if I say leave your job, forgive your wife, report your son to the authorities, don't pay the blackmail, go back on the drink, tell your colleague he has smelly feet, I could possibly be absolutely right, but it would be a far better help if a few others got in on the act as well, possibly saying that you should stay in your job, never forgive your wife, pay the blackmail this minute and explaining why they feel this way.
So this is where your help is needed. Every month I will summarise a problem, worry or dilemma sent in by a reader. The following month you and I will try to solve it. If your answer is printed, you get a £25 book token.
We could get more points of view in if people were to write at under 250 words, or give me permission to cut them down a bit.
If you don't want your names at the end of your advice , then tell me what initials you'd like me to put.
Because there are not enough hours in the day I will not reply privately to any problem nor will I write to thank those of you kind enough to help me solve it.
I will do it through Box Number WHATEVER so as to keep it separate from both my mail and the Irish Times mail.