Life is a mystery. Madonna told us that, so, of course, it must be true. Actually, it is - nobody I know has the faintest clue what they’re doing, although some poor souls do feel the need to pretend they’ve got the hang of things. They haven’t - nobody has.
There are two groups of people, above all others, who claim with a straight face that they know how to sail through life and all its vagaries in a state of superior knowledge – life coaches and José Mourinho. The latter can be discounted on the grounds that he’s a verse or two short of a fado performance and the former can be offered no credence whatsoever on the basis that if these people really did know what they were doing they’d be able to get a proper job.
However, dear reader, you need not despair - I have the solution. Happiness is easier to achieve than we previously thought. All a person has to do to attain the glorious glow of eternal contentment is the following: Do everything backwards.
It’s easy. History is riddled with the names of the truly great – those who grasped the notion that doing everything in reverse brings us our own personal Nirvana. Jimi Hendrix understood it - how did he become the greatest electric guitarist of his generation, and, possibly, of all time? Why, he played a right-handed guitar left-handed with the strings on the wrong way round, of course.
The great mystery writers have always written backwards. They begin by writing the document and leaving it in a dusty corner somewhere. They then spend endless lonesome hours trying to work what would be the best way to get back to where they started. Shakespeare knew this, as did Sir Arthur Conan Doyle and, most importantly, the bloke who wrote Columbo.
What turned the Volkswagen Beetle into the best-selling car in the world despite the fact that driving one is like piloting a home made go-kart, though nowhere near as safe? Simple – the designers put the engine in the boot and it sold like hot cakes destined to burn your fingers.
On the subject of cars, everybody knows that if you attempt to drive forwards into a parking space the length of Chile, it means complete strangers will point and laugh at you and you’ll never ever get the vehicle to fit. Reversing, however, allows you to manoeuvre into a space of matchbox proportions incorporating a pike and twist en route, all the while smiling and waving at the pretty girls who’ve stopped to watch. Women themselves, it should be noted, prefer to park a couple of miles from the kerb at an angle that defies physics, presumably on purpose.
There’s more. Ask any teenager in a black t-shirt with hair fresh out of the chip pan and he’ll tell you that merely by playing one of his heavy-metal records backwards you can obtain your very own message courtesy of Mr. Mephistopheles. (Actually, you can get the same effect playing a Celine Dion song forwards, but keep that one under your hat because it flies in the face of my theory, and it’ll make the teenager feel less special).
There are many more examples of the ‘Backwards Is The Way Forwards’ theory but owing to a maximum number of word constraints I’m unable to bring them to you here. So I bid you a brief yet appropriate farewell, until the next time.
Regards