IF you thought April was the time to do a bit of spring cleaning, think again: with Feng Shui you can do it any time, and that includes autumn. Feng Shui - it means "wind and water" in Chinese - is the art of siting your house and its furniture in a way that will pick up the lines of energy that flow through it. In fact, it's a bit like acupuncture for buildings.
"Take doors, for instance," says Karen Kingston, who divides her time between England and Bali, and whose book, Creating Sacred Space, is a best seller in its field. "Most people site their work table or desk with their back to the door, which leaves them feeling watchful. There's always part of them on guard."
Instead, you should arrange things in whatever room you re working in so that you have a clear view of both door and windows - a tip any bank manager would pass on if they had a mind to.
Everyone has theories about the lines of energy that run through this earth of ours. Some gardeners, for instance, will only plant their carrots along a particular axis. Some people sleep better when their beds are positioned in a certain way.
"A lot of it is to do with first creating space and then making best use of the energy that flows through that space," Kingston told me. "You usually find that certain aspects of family life are located in certain rooms. There'll be one for relationships, one for health, one for work and/or career."
In some South African cultures, a shaman will be invited into a house to gather in the good spirits. Every country, says Kingston, has its own form of ritual connected with the harnessing of energy, but some have let it fall into disuse.
WHAT we need to do, she says, is to develop the art of placement: "If there's too much clutter in one room or the other, things won't work as well as they might." Which is where the autumn spring cleaning comes in.
So order the skip, roll up the sleeves, shift that desk around - and, if you can enrol on Karen Kingston's Feng Shui course at Roundwood.