The Digested Twenty-first Century (25 page)

4.
  The Modernist tradition, inspired by Le Corbusier, flirted uneasily with science and functionalism. For instance, you might think that numbering my paragraphs was both scientific and functional: it isn’t. It’s just pretentious.

5.
  If engineering cannot tell us what is beautiful, how do we escape the sterile relativism, which suggests that to label one building more aesthetically pleasing is to be undemocratic? By lapsing into an equally sterile relativistic debate about cultural and moral values contingent on architecture.

6.
  Buildings and objects can convey meaning with a single line or an elaborate flourish. They are the repository of ideas and ideals. I once walked from McDonald’s in Victoria to Westminster Cathedral, a journey of only a few yards for ordinary people but a marathon expedition into the soul for someone of my sensitivity and intellect.

7.
  I seem to be running out of things to say, so let me talk about art for a while. Who cannot admire the sadness in a painting by Pieter de Hooch without coming close to tears? You may feel your eyes welling up as you read; these, though, are tears of boredom.

8.
  A beautiful building, as Prince Charles once opined, is a transubstantiation of our individual ideals in a material medium. Whatever love is. It is, however, in Friedrich Schiller that we find the clearest elucidation of the ways in which the finest architecture can embody our collective memory and idealised potential.

9.
  We note, though, that ideals of beauty change over time. This should not stop us making sweeping generalisations. Great architecture has a natural sense of order, one that mirrors the
natural world where I am at the top and you are much further down. I was once recovering from too much thinking in an expensive hotel that was done-up in the neo-renaissance style found in Amsterdam and was perplexed to find myself overwhelmed with anomie. Then I remembered I was in Japan.

10.
 How can we escape the notion that someone called Derek, Malcolm or Prescott will despoil a green field with box-like structures for the lower orders? By owning your own country estate.

Digested read, digested:
The literature of pretention.

I was sitting in my study, wondering whether I would ever write a book again, when my little dog Bonnie leapt on to my lap and said: ‘Oh Bel! / As far as I can tell / You’ve been through hell.’ I ruffled her fur playfully as a solitary tear welled. ‘You’ve been my rock in my painful separation from J, the cleverest man in the universe,’ I replied. Bonnie looked me in the eyes. ‘Then milk it, you dozy fool. Everyone knows J is Jonathan Dimbleby and at least one publisher must be interested. Even if you do write like a pretentiously overwrought Jilly Cooper.’

Bonnie came unto us one January morning when the pale sun glimmered milkily over the icy Somerset fields. I looked up from Creative Writing for Beginners and noticed a tiny dog tied to a tree. ‘You’ve come to save me, Bonnie,’ I said, for I instinctively knew her name. ‘Yup,’ Bonnie yapped. ‘But first I could do with a piss.’

J and I welcomed Bonnie into the warmth of our immensely successful
media lifestyle and she was feted throughout Bath as she strolled through that splendid Georgian town in her Nicole Farhi jacket while reading Jane Austen. The summer of 2002 was the happiest time of my life. J and I had been blissfully married for 35 years and I had never stopped being grateful that this impossibly brilliant man had plucked me from my humble origins and allowed me to blossom into one of the finest writers ever to fill a newspaper column. I was lost in the newness of the Truth.

Then tragedy. J met the soprano Susan Chilcott. It was a
coup de foudre
. He returned to our farmhouse with a first edition of Middlemarch. ‘I shall always love you and don’t want a divorce and all that, Bel,’ he said. ‘But Susan and I are in love.’ I understood his needs, so Bonnie and I packed our bags for a B&B.

Friends have expressed surprise that I never hated Susan, but who was I – a latter day saint and seer – to deny another woman the love of the world’s most charismatic man? And even when she so tragically died a few months later, I could only feel the pain of a great love lost. Besides, I still had Bonnie. ‘Let’s go shopping to cheer ourselves up,’ she would say, as I wrestled with the gravity of Dante and Botox. ‘Why don’t you buy me that lovely Swarovski crystal collar?’

I was also helped by my immensely successful and influential friends on national papers who offered to send me on expensive holidays to all parts of the world for their travel sections, along with my great friend Robin, a photographer who is somewhat younger than me. We became very close, and though Robin must have understood he will never be as important to me as either J or Bonnie, he asked me to marry him.

My acceptance had nothing to do with the phone call from J the previous day. ‘I still love you and all that, Bel,’ he had said. ‘But I’ve met this great bird in her 20s and I need a divorce.’ How
angry I get when people criticise J for having a mid-life! Don’t they understand the desires of the Great? Though it was jolly nice to be invited to the wedding of my best friends Prince Charles and Camilla. How wonderful to see a man happy with a woman his own age!

And so my life moved on. How I teetered with indecision when the
Daily Mail
offered me 10 times the money
The Times
was paying for my agony aunt column! Again, Bonnie came to the rescue. ‘Take the cash, you moron. I need a pedicure.’ So I did and I have never looked back, even when Bonnie had a splinter in her paw and I thought she might die. Fortunately my immense self-knowledge and the words of Kahlil Gibran were a comfort.

Through this time of personal growth I have emerged a stronger person. I know the love J and I have for one another was just too strong for us to stay together, so, as I anxiously await his texts, I happily lie in bed with Bonnie, while Robin curls up in his basket on the floor.

Digested read, digested:
Get out while you still can, Bonnie.

I am extremely disappointed to find out that after I have made you thin, made you rich, mended your broken heart, changed your life in seven days, given you instant confidence and guaranteed you success in 90 days in my previous books, you are all still as miserable as sin. I only hope you read this book a little more carefully than you have the others. For those who have difficulty reading, I have included a CD; don’t worry if you do not
have a machine to play it on. Just close your eyes and imagine a CD player in front of you. Now reach down and take it. Easy.

If you have bought this book, you have made a great start to a world of infinite happiness. How do I know this? Because you must be incredibly suggestible to imagine I can make you happy and therefore if I tell you I am making you happy you will probably believe it. If you don’t believe this, let’s start with me. One of the reasons I am so happy is because you have paid £10.99 for this book. That’s right. Each one of you has made me happy, so allow yourself to be happy that you have made me happy. I understand that some of you may be feeling depressed and saying to yourselves, ‘Paul is a charlatan’; let me reassure you that scientists have been amazed at how many people I have cured of long-term depression by getting them to press the second and fourth fingers of their left hand against their nose while reciting, ‘Paul is Prozac’.

One final thing before we start in earnest. My method works. If you are still feeling unhappy at the end, then I can guarantee you will be feeling less unhappy than if you hadn’t read it. And if you really do still feel utterly fed up, then it’s because you haven’t done everything I suggested, so it’s your fault and you deserve every bit of misery coming your way.

OK, let’s move on to the practical side. Start by answering this question: on a scale of 1–10, where 1 is suicidal, how low do you feel? If you score between 1 and 3, go straight to the next chapter for five simple steps that will give you an instant pick-me-up. First read some pages with a Zen-like blue tinge round the edges, then stand up straight, stop feeling sorry for yourself, tap your collarbone five times while looking up and down very quickly 13 times and then step forward into an imaginary new you.

There. I can already sense your score has rocketed to 5 or 6, and you are ready to move on to more advanced happiness studies. Happiness
is a habit; it isn’t something that comes with new clothes. It’s something you have to work at. So start smiling and get out and take some exercise. No one can expect to be happy if they are a bit chubby.

Now imagine some happy dots in front of you and try to join them up. Start giving yourself positive messages. It’s hard to be up if you are telling yourself no one likes you; train yourself to say, ‘No one likes me but I don’t care because I don’t like anyone anyway.’

Now we’re making progress. Next, you have to learn how to make your happiness permanent. Take time out each day to think of all the things you want to achieve. Now measure up the upsides and the downsides. Suppose there’s a girl you would like to date. How would your feelings score if she said no – 3? And if she said yes – 10? So it clearly makes sense to harass as many women as possible until one says yes.

There will still be some negative things in your life that are hard to throw off, but you can diminish their power by turning them from colour to black and white in your mind and then flushing them down the toilet. Trust me. You can always achieve more than you think. A friend of mine was desperate to be an artist, so he dumped his wife and kids and is now really happy living in Paris.

If you sincerely find that none of this is working, it may be that your emotions are blocked. Ordinarily, this might take you many years of intensive therapy to overcome, but I can get you through it in just 20 minutes. See all that anger and guilt? Just let go of them. Whoosh. They’ve gone. Now you’re ready to find the deepest levels of inner happiness and bliss usually known only to Zen masters. Start by looking up my arse.

Digested read, digested:
I can make you gullible.

A lot of people wonder how Chinese parents raise such stereotypically successful kids. Well, I can tell them, because I’ve done it. You don’t allow them to have any friends, you stop them from playing sport or watching TV and you waterboard them if they get less than an A* in every subject.

Sophia is our first born. At three months old, I left her for days on her own to learn Poincaré’s conjecture while I rewrote the US constitution, and by the time she was three she could speak seven languages, play Rachmaninov’s Third Piano Concerto and had never so much as smiled. She was the ideal Chinese Tiger Mother’s daughter.

My second child, Lulu, was more of a handful. Even though she, too, was far more talented than the second-rate children of decadent American parents, she tried to resist my will at every turn. At the age of two, she refused to do more than 10 hours of maths homework a night and deliberately played wrong notes in the Mendelssohn Violin Concerto. The only thing that worked was to wire electrodes to her hands.

There was a third child, Tiananmen. He was even more wilful and used to get out of his pram and stand defiantly in Times Square. Regrettably, I had to crush him with a tank. His death was not wholly in vain: Sophia and Lulu gave me a lot less trouble after that.

Growing up in the US as the child of Chinese immigrants, I was conscious of how indulgent American parents were. No Chinese parent would dream of praising a child unless he or she got 100% in all subjects, but Americans would congratulate their worthless offspring for getting an A–. I made a vow I would respect
my children enough never to show I loved them. Feebleminded, lazy Americans feel they have a duty of care towards their children. Chinese parents regard their kids as objects to be abused and moulded in their own image and I was determined that neither of my surviving kids should fall short of my own brilliant standards, which I will boast about at length.

I admit I was ruthless and I would fire maths and music teachers at will if they did not keep Sophia and Lulu on course for winning a Nobel prize and playing at the Carnegie Hall. And my husband, Jed, did sometimes question my psychopathic narcissism by suggesting it might help if we were to occasionally tell the children we loved them. I thought about that for a nanosecond and then dismissed it, because I’m always right about everything. ‘I am the Chinese Tiger Mother,’ I yelled. ‘You are just American Pussy Father. Your job is to be useless and defer to me.’

Sophia continued to be the perfect child, winning first prize at everything and playing piano brilliantly. Lulu continued to be more trouble, complaining she was happy to do nine hours’ practice a night but not 10. ‘You’re shaming the whole family,’ I screamed at her. ‘Go on, give up the violin and make me look like a complete failure. Next you’ll be saying you want to have friends.’

Jed interrupted. ‘I thought you might like to know my book is now number two in the
New York Times
bestseller chart,’ he said. ‘Second?’ I screamed. ‘You pathetic American Pussy Father. You heap greater ignominy on me; even the dog has let me down by coming third at the international dog show.’

These were more difficult times for me as my sister had leukaemia and Chinese Tiger Mothers cannot tolerate such genetic weakness in their families. Luckily she recovered before I had to disown her, and I redoubled my efforts to make sure my children did not show me up. Music lessons were increased to
13 hours a day, all holidays were cancelled and any hint of vulnerability was punished by a week in solitary confinement.

I’m pleased to say it’s all paid off magnificently. Everyone says my daughters are the most talented prodigies ever known and that I must be the world’s greatest mother, especially as the American Pussy Father is a waste of space. What’s more, Sophia and Lulu are two of the happiest kids you could imagine. If you don’t believe me, ask them.