Wednesday November 5th 2008 09.21

Speeding through Interesting Times

Richard Ashworth

Feng Shui Diaries

Solar fortnight beginning:

Wednesday November 5th 2008 09.21

Speeding through Interesting Times
Steve is an Aussie. He’s 50-something but he could be 15 years less. He’s a good-looking bloke, reluctantly single, with his own business. He’s a Snake (now you can work it out, girls) so in November he can expect challenges as the yin water of the Pig challenges the yin fire of the Snake: a certain suppression. He’s a retainer client; that is to say he pays a small fortune to have me on tap.

I’m up with him here in darkest Staffs because sales have dipped for the first time this year. Are we credit-crunched?

He picks me up from the station, buys me a nice dinner – grilled scallops since you asked – and drives me to the B&B he has arranged. He is a fast skilled driver and he’d better be because his Japanese sports car with fins does 0-60 in a pico-second. I remember with a lurch that the Pig/Snake clash is often about impeded movement. Don’t want any of that at this speed.

Feng shui is sometimes defined as “doing the right thing in the right place at the right time”. Last week he performed an “activation,” I prescribed for him to boost business. These activation times are going out to my retainer clients as the fortuitous dates arise: sometimes weekly, sometimes more, sometimes less often. A recent lunch with Master Joey Yap reminded me that date selection or Ze Ri Xue is the secret weapon of feng shui. Often when results are not immediate, this is because feng shui procedures have not been performed at the optimum moment.

Steve’s a good man and a kind man and he treats his staff well. He has just told them their hours may be cut in the run up to Christmas.

My brief is to keep his business growing and get him a life. We’ve done well to date and as it happens, match.com has recently presented him with pretty much what he’s looking for woman-wise. She is 40-something, beautiful, fit and easy to amuse, he says. This order of priorities of course tells us something about men.

She lives just half-a-mile away. She even frequents the same gym as Steve.

There is a problem: she has college-age children and little down-time.

“Most of the women draw the line at 48,” he says. “But like you said, I’m not looking for a statistic, I only want one woman.”

“Just as well.”

They’ve met twice now and she owes him a call. He’s a bit agitated about it.

“She said she’d phone by now and she hasn’t.” He looks at his Blackberry; he’s on hands-free.

“Busy,” I say in explanation. Earlier this year he was hurt by a flaky Rooster. We can’t of course be damaged without our own participation. “Broadly what she is likely to be looking for is a knight on a white charger,” I say, “The more she likes you, the more she’ll test you. You know she’s busy. You know she has reasons with which most people would sympathise. She’s not going to drop those until you’ve passed a few tests, is she?”

He revs and takes a corner very fast. I guess he knows the road. It’s not, I am told, coming out of corners too quickly that leads to accidents but going into them.

Down and Out in GU1

Earlier in the Pig month. My wife Sheila and I are in Guildford shopping. A stockbrokers’ dormitory town in the wealthy SouthEast of the post-boom UK, if there is anywhere that is meltdown- proof surely it is Guildford. Nonetheless as we shelter from the rain in the West Cornwall Pasty shop – at least that’s my story – we can not deny that the pavements are quieter than we would expect. We go into a classy ladies’ clothes shop. Like each one we have entered, its stock is largely marked down. A gown Sheila is quite taken by is temptingly reduced from £279 to £129. We settle on a cotton shirt slashed from £72 to £28.

“We don’t have to buy in to the credit crunch of course,” I say incautiously to the lady serving me who has kindly written down what the hypnotic French music playing overhead is. Accordions and breathy voices, brothel music, Sheila calls it.

“How do we not buy in?” she protests. “Fewer people in, less money deposited in the bank, there’s no arguing with it.”

Although this would stand discussion, she has a point..

Back home now, we will Sheila and I agree, compile a list of super-powerful activation dates. These consist of a precise Chinese double hour to throw energy at a particular location in shop, home or office. The times can be as early as 5 a.m. Times that early may prove demanding but the action is simple: scrub, dust, hoover, tidy, remove heavy objects, play music, talk, exercise, turn on tv, radio, cd player, fan or water feature in the prescribed location for the two hours selected. Throw energy. That’s it. Then sit back and see what happens.

On the day of the first “activation” Paul who is in the movie business calls. He has been offered a big job in Hollywood that he thought had passed him by at the cv stage.

“The only drawback is I’m not sure I want it,” he says.

“Good problem. Why don’t you consider carefully exactly how outrageous the package would have to be for your consideration, add 10% and make those your conditions?.”

“20%,” he says. He is in the movie business.

Then my friend Marcella in Hollywood emails me. She is not in the movie business. She is a gifted architect who does feng shui for real estate agents. Following activation in the property, her client rents out an apartment that has been empty for over a year and also starts to show all the signs of getting a life. By “life” I mean 172 hits on her match.com page. It turns out to be a busy weekend for her.

After the second activation, Rory over in Dublin who has had a lonely year, receives out of the blue an email from a special person and congratulation from his supervisor who has to date been to encouragement rather as Mary Baker Eddy was to surgery.

After the third, my racehorse trainer about whom I can say no more or he’ll be straight on the phone, has after a lean patch three winners in three days. My friends Elaine and Doug down at the Andover Workhouse, the nastiest building in the UK, finally get an offer of work and Doug gets out of bed. Bless them: they have been hanging on by their fingernails since August.

For the most part these are my retainer clients; that is to say that each, like Steve, pays me to be on call. One or two are simply people so stuck we could not with compassion exclude them.

Question: How have these dates been compiled?

Answer: Using everything I know about date selection: the Twelve Officers which dictate suitable activities for particular dates, the 28 Mansions of the Moon which tell whether the date is fortunate or not, the Sam He formula which says who a date is lucky for as well as the Yuen Hom kua numbers which fix a date numerologically. Oh and the Dong Gong Calendar compiled by the Ming Dynasty genius Dong De Zhang, sometimes called the Chinese Nostradamus, who by sheer trial and error added to his astrological calculations, records of exactly what happened on every one of the days in the Chinese gan zi cycle of 60.

If they are retainer clients I have surveyed their buildings, so they already have a chi map to locate the sectors. I advise them when in doubt, to overshoot rather than cover too small an area.

Steve does his own dusting.

Now we’re driving back to Birmingham New Street. It is dark and rainy. Over in the distance Fort Dunlop blinks at us, the enormous neon letters, now red, now green. I can’t see them clearly at all when they’re red. Steve sees both colours equally clearly. When he glances at his sat-nav he changes focus effortlessly.

Today we have renewed the chi trail from the direct mountain to his factory door. We have measured up the final change following from the Xuan Kong chi calculation: the back door has to move 7°. That’s more than you might think but Steve is such a precise can-do guy, he has it under control. Though frankly it’s taken him a while to get to it. We need to get this North West door right for next year when the North East will be tricky.

We have talked about Steve’s huge family back in Oz. He’ll be there for a month over Christmas. Not all his siblings are doing that great and he is now equipped with Chinese animal information with which to help. Not that, armed only with native perception, a sharp mind and a good heart he would have held back

I have visited old Syd in the mezzanine, where he assembles coils. He has not had an easy time since he joined in May. He sits among the argumentative stars 4:7 and 3:6. I have had Steve paint the wall blue here to settle it down. I’m not sure Syd feels any better yet. I’ll be back

Veronica the office manager has sought me out. She is close to 40 but you’d never know. She shows me her new engagement ring. Her much-younger fiancée presented it to her in front of a group of friends. She didn’t feel able to refuse. What should she do?

“Rooster in a Rat year, difficult times for love. The shortage of yang earth in your ba zi suggests you’re looking for Daddy. You have to make up your mind whether you can let your fiancee not be your Daddy. Easier in the Ox year.”

“I love him to bits,” she says.

“Simple then.”

Tom, the production controller has moved into his new house now and his children have, as I suggested in June, settled after the domestic upset of the Rat year. Don’t ask.

The pound is worth about a dollar twenty five and apparently 100,000 jobs have been lost in the City of London but since the activation, orders have not stopped coming in, Veronica tells me today, while I tinker, there has been another flood of business. The whole workforce will be busy well into the New Year.

“We’re not taking orders from statistics we’re taking them from individuals,” Steve reminds me.

As a parting shot, I tell Steve to arrange major Christmas decorations at the front of his North-East facing factory where the benevolent stars 4, 8 & 9 gather. One more push before the Earth Rat chi is exhausted at the solstice. A volunteer will be needed at the new moon (which inconveniently falls on Dec 27^th.) to recharge the various carefully-placed crystals. He asks for a list of books and dvds to catch up with over Christmas and then we order them from Amazon. While we’re online he shows me the lady of his dreams on match.com. She is beautiful and she did call back.

He’s got a lot to do before his plane flies.

Richard Ashworth © 2008

Names have been changed to protect..uh…me.

My (still) super-duper (still) revamped website is atwww.imperialfengshui.infoand my book The Feng Shui Diaries is available now from:

Amazon(www.amazon.co.uk/Feng-Shui-Diaries-Richard-Ashworth/dp/1846940176/sr=8-4/qid=1166798863/ref=sr_1_4/026-3383613-4930062?ie=UTF8&s=books

Waterstoneswww.waterstones.com/waterstonesweb/displayProductDetails.do?sku=5567853)

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