As our proud nation daily becomes more materially successful, and we slough off the last of our ancient religious beliefs and rites for the new millennium, it seems that many of us still find ourselves in need of spiritual sustenance.
The traditional churches have practically given up on us (or we on them), so to fill the perceived need, bookshop shelves are collapsing under the weight of the most awful pseudo-spiritual drivel, much of it along the lines of the embarrassing Little Book of Calm.
Written by simpletons and charlatans in equal measure, this new spiritual "literature", despite being for the most part illiterate, vacuous, saccharine, inane and entirely silly, appears to sell by the ton-load. The people who think this stuff is nutritious food for the soul are badly in need of proper spiritual dietary advice.
They wouldn't dream of putting the equivalent into their stomachs, and yet they are drip-feeding their immortal souls with this dangerous rubbish.
If there is a spiritual equivalent to CJD, these consumers are asking for it.
It seems odd that we can't all think more about spiritual independence when we're so keen on achieving financial independence. But maybe we all need a bit of spiritual uplift from time to time. Jemser! Give us another gin-and-Platonic there, and a pint of that divine new ale of yours, Linga Sharira. A quare name but it's great stuff. Thankfully, here at home we have much healthier soul food on offer in publications like The Whoseday Book, Lifelines, Marie Heaney's Sources ("Sustenance for the Soul"), and the new Reflections book from Veritas.
All of this stuff is organically grown to the highest standards and while not cheap, the quality of the produce is superb and the money goes to charitable causes.
The way it works is simplicity (itself). Selected people - important, very important and seriously self-important - are contacted. They choose the poems or bits of prose that buoy them up in times of spiritual crisis, or when hung over (often coterminous).
They bung these items in to the editor, who glues them together, calls on some national deity to pen an introduction, and hey presto, there's your spiritual nosh between hard covers. Hold on. I am wrong about it always being important people. To coarsen the mixture, and add necessary roughage, contributions are often solicited from some ordinary people, some really ordinary people, and even some journalists.
In theory, you could find - spiritually speaking, always - a verbal fry-up chosen by a part-time ratcatcher on the page opposite a gourmet metaphysical quatrain selected by an eminent heart surgeon. All this is only by way of build-up to my own new post-Christmas publication, The Fit To Be Tied Book ("Special Words from Special People") in which celebrities and the odd nonentity reveal the literature they turn to when they are just a little disappointed with life, or, sometimes, pretty exasperated.
For example, Euan FwynethKrike, the eminent Cork archaeologist, calls on the Turkish writer Fatu Win Dor:
When I am down,
I am down. And I think
Who put me here?
When I find out,
I will crucify that person. Serife!
A plasterer from Mallow, Eamon Mack, chooses a thoughtful haiku by his wife Pearl:
Our neighbours suck.
They have no need
Of straws.
The exciting young RTE television producer Riff Quark has selected a rhyming couplet that "just came into" his head:
Basically I think,
Other people's programmes
stink.
These are just a few extracts from this uplifting collection. In the new year I hope to edit another new volume, The Who Do They Think They Are Book, a collection of very bitter letters from the few remaining people in Ireland not yet chosen to contribute to a book of spiritual sustenance.
