I’d like to tell you a story about my friend Jemima Postlethwaite – a story of house purchase, feng shui and amazing miracles. I swear, every word is totally incredibly true.
Jemima’s story of acquiring her new dream home didn’t start at all well. Even before she completed the purchase – It was a bijou flat in Sussex Square In Brighton – things started to go wrong. The day she signed the contract, Jemima lost her job as PA to the editor on a glossy \’new wave’ magazine – the very editor whose job Jemima herself had been hoping to usurp before long.
From the day she moved into the new apartment, she felt like a completely different person. She became irritable and moody. Her skin blotched and turned flaky. She got frequent migraines and panic attacks. She had PMS every day of the month. Her previously lush sex life became an arid desert.
Jemima seemed to have no energy at all. When she got up In the morning, her body felt unbelievably heavy. She noticed that in only a week, her feet had worn a bare pathway in the carpet from her bed to the door. She became extremely prone to accidents. One day at the local swimming pool, her toe was bitten off by a piranha fish put in the pool by a nasty Little schoolboy. Her finances became a total disaster area.
So now Jemima couldn’t pay her bills, couldn’t get work and couldn’t get laid – no matter how hard she tried. And I’m telling you, she tried hard . Perhaps worst of all, nobody would laugh at her jokes. Something was terribly wrong. All this, she knew, was somehow connected with her new home.
A friend suggested that Jemima call in the renowned Feng Shui Master, Hi Fee Lee. As soon as Master Lee entered Jemima’s home, he could see that things were terribly wrong. For a start, there was a large and heavy beam running right over her bed. This, Lee explained, was psychologically bearing down on her as she slept, making her literally heavy as lead. Next, she had placed a bonsai Mongolian Rhubarb plant in the southwest corner of her bathroom, activating the zone which is classically known as the Great Big Fat Disaster Area. And her furniture layout was all wrong – she had a purple sofa next to a pink armchair, and clashing curtains with a floral pattern in the same room. This was obviously no good at all.
Worst of all, after dowsing with his jade rod, Master Lee found that there were hundreds of lines of geopathic stress in the dwelling. These are pathways along which the natural energies are distorted, causing the Earth to feel classic stress symptoms such as tension headaches, anxiety, shortness of temper and eczema, which are then picked up by resident humans. These were acting as ‘Negative Lay Lines’, making sexual fulfilment virtually impossible. Perhaps the fact that the previous occupants had all gone mad and committed ritual Hara Kiri should have alerted Jemima.
The solution, however, was remarkably simple. Master Lee began by using Earth Acupuncture to correct the patterns of geopathic stress. He drove a long steel spike into the floor at the corner of each room, while intoning a loud and continuous “Om” with Mongolian overtones, and then festooned the top of each spike with yellow chrysanthemums. These were to be removed after a year.
To lighten the overbearing effect of the beam, Master Lee suggested attaching a small wire cage full of live butterflies. To attract and keep sexual partners, he advised Jemima to grow a Venus Fly Trap in her bedroom window box. To further enhance her experience of sex he prescribed sleeping with a peeled mango taped to the inside of each thigh.
Master Lee then overhauled the furniture and decor. He specified red upholstery throughout, with gold brocade curtains and matching wallpaper adorned with financial motifs drawn from the world’s major currencies. This, he said, would have a radical effect on Jemima’s money karma. He also gave her a crash course in esoteric Chinese hypnotism to secure her bank manager’s approval to the substantial loan that would be needed to fund all of this.
Next, Master Lee moved the bonsai rhubarb plant two inches to the left, out of the Great Big Fat Disaster area and into the Incredible Bounty And Unlimited Joy zone. Lastly, he got Jemima to strip off and leap around her balcony, banging Tibetan tantric cymbals and emphatically chanting “Chee, Hah!” over and over. This last measure wouldn’t help Jemima in any way – Hi Fee Lee just happened to get off on seeing his clients to do it; and it set his jade rod all aquiver.
The results were extraordinary and immediate. The day after putting the changes in place, Jemima got a call offering her editorship of Vogue magazine. In the following week, her financial fortunes completely reversed. She won the National Lottery, the Times crossword puzzle competition, a jackpot from a one-armed bandit and a packet of bath cubes from the local raffle. She was inundated with romantic propositions, and now has a multiple orgasm every time she switches on her kettle.
Jemima’s step is now light, and she feels as if she is walking on air. The butterflies are expensive to replace, but she can now pay somebody else to deal with that sort of thing. And she was pleased to learn that the little boy who Introduced the piranha to the swimming pool was sent on a young offenders recreational programme to a safari park inYorkshire, where he was eaten by a crocodile. Unfortunately people still don’t laugh at Jemima’s jokes, but that’s because they were so crap that even Master Lee couldn’t do anything about those.