Monday February 19th 2007 09.08

yu soi – Rain Water

Richard Ashworth

Feng Shui Diaries

Solar fortnight beginning:

Monday February 19th 2007 09.08

Hour Day Month Year

earth wood water fire

ji chia ren ding

si shen yin hai

snake monkey t iger pig

Month: ren yin the water Tiger

Solar Fortnight: yu soi Rain Water

Snow Patrol

Returning from Linz, I look down from 10,000 feet at the Danube winding like a big silver sloeworm across Austria towards Hungary where it will separate the twin cities of Buda and Pest before eventually emptying into the Black Sea. The water is alternately gleaming and dull as the clouds pass over it. I try to pick out where I have been the last few days.

As this fortnight or breath called yu soi* or Rain Water opens, I have been surveying Inge and Ed’s home in Austria where the threat is of snow rather than rain. In fact there is a serious shortage of threat altogether. The Austrians are so civilised and so conscious of the quality of life. This country may be the most environmentally aware in Europe; there are no nuclear power stations, low speed limits regulate emissions and a four-and-a-half day week is normal. I am returning full of Sacher Torte and good coffee after confirming that Inge and Ed have failed in their attempts to seriously damage the astonishing natural feng shui of their home.

They are good, sincere people and their life together is a story of things never quite taking off and they deserve a break, so forgive my easy flippancy. What they want is to complete their dream home after twelve years of work on it. And why not?

I am listening on my iPod to the implausible complaints of the bunch of Hollywood brats known as the Strokes. Reptilia is a great tune. If I ever have my own tv show, I’d like the instrumental break as the theme. Next selection in the shuffle is one of the good time songs of the late great Ronnie Lane. The Poacher: a celebration of the simple life.

* soi is shui that is water as in feng shui, of course.


“Bring me fish with eyes of gold and mirrors on their bodies,” he sings in that wide open voice. Lillian Too would approve.

Ronnie Lane who was the bass player with Small Faces and co-wrote most of their hits, died of multiple sclerosis in 1997 at the age of 51. I remember reading an account of one of his last public appearances.

“I’m melting,” he told an interviewer.

I look at the horizon along the top of the cloud. There was a time when the horizon seemed impossibly far. Now the world is so small.

This is the year of the Fire Pig, so the year chi (or tai sui) pushes North-West to South East. I calculate the Chinese year from the Winter Solstice and feng shui masters disagree over this. Now however with Spring sprung and the Chinese Lunar New Year also past, there is no arguing: the Pig is in full swing. Winter is over, the sap is rising, things are happening.

I am told there has not been a great deal of snow this year and I am over the wrong wing to see the Alps but nonetheless the view is humbling. The plane is full of skiers returning home, a well-mannered but excitable bunch, presumably not disgruntled by any snow shortage. Stewards pass with a trolley of snacks. No thanks.

The Pig, especially the Fire Pig or Pig Passing the Mountain, is a symbol of plump prosperity but you don’t oppose even this comfortable-sounding beast under any circumstances. Never face the tai sui for long. Don’t renovate and above all, do not dig foundations here. For your information, the tai sui moves 30° clockwise every year.

As it happens, Inge and Ed’s plan to counter the most powerful negative force in Chinese metaphysics, is by way of celebration of the 12th anniversary of the last time they did it in 1995. This is the chi equivalent of nutting breeze blocks. Twelve years, from open field to today, they have been working on this house. There are three floors; they live on the middle one, put visitors such as me up underneath and have not yet fully plastered the top one.

Ed and Inge designed this extraordinary house themselves. It is odd in all sorts of ways. There are for instance five corners which puts the rear wall out of parallel with the front: a potential feng shui pitfall. You might think that since feng shui makes such a fuss of facing directions, that the front would tell me which way the house faces. No; the facing direction for most calculations is 180° from the back wall. So because of the irregular shape, there is in effect a great chunk missing at the front. What is not missing is the South West which relates to Inge, the mother of the house who has finally after many years returned to the country of her birth. This part of the house is like Inge, settled.

The areas that are vulnerable are the North West which relates to Ed and the SouthEast which relates to their beautiful daughter Anna. If the South East is not in effect, in the house, neither is the eldest daughter. Change the house, you change the person.

They are worried about Anna. Which parent of teenagers is not worried? Children are God*’s way of keeping us anxious. But Anna whose language of choice is English has not settled just as the building suggests. Her English is unaccented middle-class and full of up-to-the-minute idioms: “Euh” for dislike, “cool” for approval and so on. The banter in the kitchen sounds to me like home. I note that the South East is the likely problem area and it is odd for a moment to be in darkest Austria. Same for Anna, I think.

* Spirit, Higher Mind, Primum Mobile, Big G – as you like.

Twelve years. Ed has a demanding job in a country he hardly knows and Inge has all three floors as well as a teenage daughter to maintain and keep tidy but as my father was fond of saying: “The best part of banging your head against a brick wall is stopping.”

Ed is a talented musician. He plays me some of his material in his basement studio basement. It is in the West of the home which is the appropriate place for music. The songs are country-tinged, warm and touching.

“I want to paint,” Inge says but says she has nowhere to do it.

The house sits perhaps a third of the way up a substantial Alpine foothill. Behind is not mountain but Mountain. In front the valley floor sweeps away onto an uncluttered plain which is itself divided by a winding river. Beyond that is further plain then in the distance, table mountain*. This is peerless exterior feng shui, crisply beautiful and entirely the work of nature. A Chinese emperor, political and practical considerations to one side, might have chosen to be buried here.

There is hardly any fence anywhere. That evening I wander outside in the Alpine cold. It is hard to know when I am in their garden and when next door and I am inclined to suggest better enclosure but I feel the chi rolling down from the height and I know this is an unnecessary consideration. The Classic says chi flows down from the mountain where it is held by the water. And it is all here. The Big G seems to know what he is doing.

Nonetheless at this rate they will never finish this beautiful house. And there is more.

I might have been alerted by the apartment I surveyed for them in Maida Vale last year. They had wanted to turn one stylish two-floor apartment with a lovely entrance and a lovely exit into two nasty one-floor flats, one without an entrance and the other without an exit and both toxic with stale chi. To their credit I was able to talk them out of it.

“This may be our last chance to make real money,” Ed said and I could see his point of view. He had worked hard and long designing dream homes for billionaires and thought it time his own dreams came true.

The South East had been a problem here too but the cruncher had been the plan to extend to the rear. A single level added to a three or four storey building is controversial in the first place but there was more: the house backed onto the Dog, the tai sui of 2006. So the central area at the rear could not be disturbed. But that wasn’t the whole of it either: some fell into the nearby Pig which meant that a good chunk of any extension couldn’t go up in 2007 either. Fiddly as hell.

You can ignore these principles and people do, of course.

They didn’t and six months later I received an email telling me that following their not spending any time or money on it, the unhacked-about apartment had put on a further £100,000 and would I fly over in case they were shooting themselves in their Austrian foot also.

So I should not be surprised that here in Austria in the face of some of the loveliest form school feng shui I have seen in my life, they are preparing to assault the Pig. They have positioned their lovely “winter garden,” a sort of first floor conservatory, so that the breathtaking view it opens onto shows exactly where the problem is. Already the land falls away to the North West. This is not to be messed with and especially not now.

* A table mountain for your information, ought not to appear higher than your head as you look out of your front door.


Ed and Inge’s plan is to put thousands of gallons of rain water tank under this corner. As we eat in the winter garden a wonderful vegetarian dinner Inge has made in my honour on the second night, I tell them the water tanks amount to hara-kiri. There is a small altar in one corner.

“For my meditation,” says Inge.

“Do you manage to fit much in ? I ask and she shakes her head.

“No time.”

As I said, they’d done it before. In 1995 they had drilled into the mountain to make a floor. It was since then that they had not been able to get started. False start after false start. There was even (bullet point number one in my report) a foul pipe open on the unfinished top floor that smelled like the toilets on Day 6 at Glastonbury. And as so often happens, there is seriously disturbed energy opposite where the drilling took place. This is in the South East which you will recall, represents the Eldest Daughter: the garage which is built into the basement floor and served by two electric doors, one for each car.

Although each time I go in, I feel a major disturbance, a shuddery dizziness, the effects have not been major, just endless delay. Perhaps such perfect form school feng shui is more forgiving than I am used to. Nonetheless I’m glad they’ve cancelled the tanks. Tricky stuff.

Not everyone is impressed by this off-the-wall stuff. Inge and Ed and Anna however, are prepared to rise at 6 on the morning of the third day to assist me in a ritual of apology. We enter by a smaller door from the house. As I enter I feel earth energy extreme enough to make my hair curl were it not already. I feel it in my chest and head simultaneously; a spinning and a feeling of pressure. It is like entering the caverns of Mordor. I half-expect a balrog to appear.

“Run you fools!”

The ritual involves holding hands and feeling into the disturbance followed by the placing of some crystals and jiu shapes. It is a tense few minutes and Ed particularly appears anxious. Afterwards I’m frankly not for a few minutes, sure which way up I am myself.

Finally I whizz around the house with Inge adjusting mirrors and other décor and placing outside water to focus the chi form. This ought to unstick everything and allow the job to get finished. The rest is fine-tuning and explaining.

There is fine Northern light on the top floor. Paint here, I tell Inge. Also her retreat would be better placed in the North East which suits meditation. For Ed, I prescribe some mirrors in one corner to magnify the energy of the studio and tie it into the family.

Job done, I hope; I put my luo pan away.

Then and not before, I get my Sacher Torte and coffee. We visit a wonderful coffee shop overlooking a bend of the Danube. There are hardly any ships on the river and we watch it twinkle in the sunlight. Ed drives me to the airport and I wish him a song in his heart, a smile on his lip and a spring in his onion. They have looked after me well.

I shall treat Anna as the barometer of the changes. If she’s happier we’re on the mend.

My new super-duper revamped website is at www.imperialfengshui.info and

my book The Feng Shui Diaries is out now!

If you’re feeling rash you can order it from:

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or indeed Tescos.

Names have been changed.

Richard Ashworth

29, Portsmouth Road, Godalming, Surrey, GU7 2JU | tel: 01483 428998 | info@imperialfengshui.info

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