The King of Peru

The King of Peru
(Who was Emperor too)
Had a sort of a rhyme
Which was useful to know,
If he felt very shy
When a stranger came by,
Or they asked him the time
When his watch didn't go;

Or supposing he fell
(By mistake) down a well,
Or he tumbled when skating
And sat on his hat,
Or perhaps wasn't told,
Till his porridge was cold -
That his breakfast was waiting -
Or something like that;

Oh, whenever the Emperor
Got into a temper, or
Felt himself sulky or sad,
He would murmur and murmur
Until he felt firmer,
This curious rhyme which he had:

Eight eights are sixty-four,
Multiply by seven.
When it's done,
Carry one
And take away eleven.
Nine nines are eighty-one
Multiply by three.
If it's more
Carry four,
And then it's time for tea.

As you may know I have been 'tagged' (by UPL) to write something on beating the blues. Five little somethings in fact. A bit like desert island discs, I suppose. Not records in this case but homespun remedies for shooting the 'black dog' that I might take along as a luxury, perhaps, to accompany the Bible and Shakespeare.

As a child I suffered badly from depression - or sulking - as it was known then. I'm afraid I was a tearful, wilful child constantly in hock to my moods and always ready to cut off my nose to spite my face.

Maybe I was moody because I was (or thought I was) unloved and perhaps even unlovable. I felt a natural affinity for sad, lonely, romantic nonsense; Cinderella and Ugly Duckling stories, tales of orphans and animals with broken legs. I was negative Eeyore, down to my shoelaces: "We can't all and some of us don't!"

I can't actually remember whether AA Milne's little ditty about the Emperor made me feel any firmer. But reading such rhymes, both then and now, lifts the spirit no matter how disobliging one's mood.. Nonsense verse, even the sad nonsense verse of Edward Lear, is a great cheerer-upper. Especially if you bother learn it by heart.

I do of course still get depressed, though now I know what it is and how to handle it. But as a child it just seemed that the bottom had fallen out of my world and that those around me loathed me for reasons that seemed to me pretty obvious. Being acutely self-conscious, even I loathed me as well and took both fright and umbrage when accidentally I found a mirror in front of me. Luckily, those days are long gone.

Luckily then I was quite good at sport. A spot of vigorous exercise soon alters any overly Byronic tendencies. Physical exhaustion shakes the brain into self-preservation mode; makes you forget your angst and reminds you that you ought to buy great-Aunt a card for her birthday instead. Exercise therefore would be my second choice for mood lifting.

At University, I did student trauma like a professional. But by now I was starting to get a little fed up with feeling depressed and wanted to fight back. I discovered that one happy way to banish the blues was to eschew company, buy yourself the best bottle of wine you could afford and to drink this slowly by an open fire in the company of a good novel - something stirring and emotional.

If course it's escapism - but what's wrong with that? As an alternative there was the cinema - something romantic or philosophical for choice - feeling conspicuous and vulnerable in the cloaking darkness while being utterly transported by the flickering lights.

Once into the world of work I tried to learn more about myself and became a great fan of Eric Berne - the psychotherapist who wrote books like 'Games People Play' and 'What do you Say after you Say Hello?' I learned a lot from Berne about why I often became depressed though, sadly, he didn't seem, certainly at the time, to be offering a way out. He told me how to take the machinery to bits, but not how to fix it, and I was too poor, too shy and too afraid, I have to confess, of what my parents might think to contemplate seeking professional help. Besides, I was tough. There was nothing wrong with me! Ha!

So books on psychotherapy, while fascinating, I am not sure that I would recommend as mood lifters. Bit of a blind that one.

I think it was raising a family that actually helped with the next stage. I tried to teach my children - successfully so they now tell me - that you can learn to control your feelings.
I used to tell them that if they broke a favourite toy - that was a sad event - but the breakage was in the past. Feeling sad would not mend the toy. They didn't have to feel sad. They could choose any emotion they liked. They could be in control. We played games sometimes when they practised putting on an emotion.

I have to say they do it better a lot better than me. But Elder Daughter tells me if she feels herself losing control she can think back to those early days and switch from negative to positive emotions.

In the same vein I used to pack the children off to school with the words 'Remember to smile at your teachers' ringing in their ears. Smiling at people and remembering to thank people for each little service are two of the most powerful things you can do to make both yourself and others happy.

So that perhaps is number three.

We are already into positive thinking I feel. Everybody knows this one. Tell yourself you are happy and you will be happy - or at least happier. Tell yourself you deserve success and you will be already on the path to success, though you may need to be prepared to make the assertion all day and everyday.

Positive thinking works because we forget that our conscious minds are really only a small part of what is inside our skulls. Consciousness is like looking round a factory in the dark with a flashlight. You see little things here and there. Most of what happens, most of our decisions, lie beyond our consciousness. It is only the superficial we notice.

The unconscious mind is starved of instructions. Most of the time, for lack of anything better to work on, it is responding to negative emotions. Start giving it some positive instructions and whoomph, the wheels start turning and success widgets start forming in the darkness.

So that's number four.

That only leaves me one suggestion - so I'm going to cheat and take two. I have to say that whenever someone says something unfortunate to me and suddenly I notice that my stomach has tightened in nauseous clamminess, my bright optimistic disposition has clouded over, when I feel my anger, or humiliation rising, when the negative tapes and sentiments start playing endlessly in my mind - I simply go to the bathroom cupboard and take a tablet of St John's Wort. Bingo, in an hour and a half I am back to normal without any of the hard slog of positive thinking.

It is cheating I suppose - like that lovely scene in one of the Indiana Jones films when this swordsman flashes a scimitar in a brilliant display of passion and Indie just shoots him with a revolver.

OK that was 5A and meant for those who think that this blog has gone on for far to long already. So what is 5B?

5B is the really helpful one. Better than all the others put together, but also more complicated than all the others. It is the whole Buddhist approach to life, which, because you are intelligent and well-read people, you no doubt already know better than me already. Basically it is the realisation that unhappiness is most frequently caused simply by wanting things, whether physical things or expectations. These can be of people, or the weather, or wanting things not to break the first time you use them or expecting not to have an accident, or not to be ill, the list is endless. Basically we expect the world to be one way when in reality it is another. We couple our happiness not to how the world is, but to how the world isn't. And of course we are disappointed.
People let us down - but then people have been letting other people down since the dawn of time. It is human nature. To expect to live in a world where everyone does what is expected would be unrealistic (and also extremely boring). As Rabbi Lionel Blue once said memorably "Times too short to expect people to change, so you'd better just learn to love them the way they are."

Ambition can be a wonderful force for good - but it can also be a real crippler of the spirit, inducing us - especially in late middle age - to wring our hands and brood upon all the opportunities missed, the 'might have beens' and the 'but fors'…..

Rather than focusing on what we have, we focus on what we haven't. It really is very silly. We look at a pile of bean cans and we think that the one on the top is more important, a better bean can, than the one on the bottom.

All the surveys of happiness show that above a very basic level money or possessions do not correlate with happiness. Happiness comes from those things that money can't buy: love, friends, family, sunshine, fresh air, the sea, the sky and above all, free time.

It comes from living life skilfully, another Buddhist concept, which compares living life to driving a car. We all know the difference between a good and bad driver. But we are expected to charge pell-mell down the great highway of life trusting in luck and hoping we don't cause too much carnage, rather than learning how to handle ourselves and our relationships with others skilfully and thoughtfully.

So that then, the Buddhist philosophy, sketched ever so inadequately above, is my 5B. I know it has helped me a great deal. Sorry UPL for writing at a very unskilful length - but I haven't time (usual excuse) to write anything shorter.