MODERN LIFE: Here's a shop with a difference: it sells ideas. Or you can consult a 'bibliotherapist' who will prescribe a reading list to suit your interests and dilemmas . . . The shop is 'like a sort of apothecary for the mind. Here's your concern ; here are some ideas for it'
THE SCHOOL OF LIFE is on a grubby, ecumenical street in central London. At one end is an old-fashioned cafe advertising ham and mushroom pasta in "red, white or pink sauce". At the other is a tastefully minimalist wholefoods deli.
The school, tucked in next to a bookshop called Gay's The Word, is a grey shopfront with a large window in which, on the morning I visit, hangs a sign advertising an event called "How to Paint a Door in the Style of Anaïs Nin".
The School of Life provides - or so its website claims - "intelligent instruction on how to lead a fulfilled life". To this end, it organises a number of courses, activities and assorted events with the aim, according to director Sophie Howarth, of addressing "the big questions - the how-to-live questions. Questions that you can have had a lot of very good education and still not have any ideas about."
The intention boils down, it seems, to hitting the parts of your life that other educational institutions just can't reach. "It's the ongoing things," says Howarth. "It doesn't matter if there's a recession next year - people are still going to fall in love. And still have to do family Christmas. And still wake up in the morning wondering why they're going to their job."
The school runs courses bluntly entitled: Love, Family, Work, Politics and Play. These take place in a large, underground classroom decorated comprehensively and cheerfully with a mural by artist Charlotte Mann. But the first room the casual visitor sees is a shop. At the back is a counter, with an attendant and a till. But there is very little merchandise. One wall carries a number of small bookshelves which are dotted about, seemingly at random. The other three are home to a motley but select collection of objects for sale which, upon further investigation, include giant pencils at £10 (€12.20) and something called a Pickled Expert, for £5 (€6). At one end of the room is a red velvet chaise longue that would make Freud salivate. Various small signs advertise the services of the school's rotating faculty of "experts".
Howarth has amassed a staff of experts in a wide array of subjects. They lead mind-broadening activities according to their interests; essayist Alain de Botton runs a philosophical tour of Heathrow Airport and photographer Martin Parr recently hosted a seaside weekend on the Isle of Wight. Part of the central premise of the school is that if - as a punter - you harbour a burning question about, say, the physics of cloud formation, they can organise someone to answer it for you.
What, we ask, are the criteria for choosing your experts? "One - they've got to be seriously expert in the subject. And two - they've got to be a nice person that you want to talk to."
Another service offered by the school is "bibliotherapy". For a fee, you can take your reading needs to a bibliotherapist, who, after a consultation, will offer a prescription of suggested books. Perhaps as an adjunct to this, each bookshelf in the shop is labelled with the target audience of its contents. One is labelled "For those whose jobs are too small for their spirits"; another "For those who have fallen profoundly and unexpectedly in love" - which carries a book of Raymond Carver's short stories, as well as something called A Lover's Discourse, by the notably difficult poststructuralist philosopher Roland Barthes. The shelf tagged "How to be happy though married", however, supports only one battered, leather-bound book and a set of chocolates bearing the faces of Henry VIII's six consecutive wives; apparently there is no useful literature available on the subject.
In Ireland, I suggest, the normal response to these routine dissatisfactions is to go to the pub. Is that valid? "We-ell . . . In the pub you have the pleasures of friendship, but you're not progressing in your resources to think through the challenge that is 'I've got one life. How am I going to live it?' So we want to offer that pleasure and sociability, but also some fantastic content. We want to enlarge the possibility of who you can have conversations with, by slightly formalising conversation and discussion." The school hosts regular dinners for groups of strangers, accompanied by a "conversation menu" - a selection of thought-provoking sparks for the flames of discourse.
A lot of the school's offerings, it seems, function like these menus; they are ways of providing people with small props, intended to ease our dyspeptic transit through the piping of life. One popular service is run by the resident aphorism expert, poet and journalist James Geary - who will, after a brief assessment of your needs, provide you with a set of pithy maxims to help you on your way. The idea, says Howarth, is to provide you with "ammunition against the world. So when you're on your way to an interview and you're feeling like you've got no hope, you might suddenly remember Woody Allen saying that 70 per cent of life is just turning up."
Howarth is keen on the idea that the school is there for everyone. She complains that the worlds of culture - "the art world, the theatre world, the literary world" - guard their riches jealously; that they contain useful ideas, but not everyone feels they have access to them. The school, she says, is "a place where you can raid the resources that all of them have to offer you. Where there's a sense that it's there for all of us."
And while the prices of the various offerings might seem to limit attendance to those wondering how to rid themselves of their money - quite apart from the £10 giant pencils, the courses start at £195 (€240) and de Botton's Heathrow tour is £295 (€360) - they also lay on a variety of free events. "How to Paint a Door in the Style of Anaïs Nin" turns out to have been the previous night's entertainment, part of a series of free DIY lessons run by literary parodist Mark Crick. The woman managing the shop tells me that it was extremely lewd.
The shopfront, too, says Howarth, is part of aiming to be inclusive. "I wanted it to be on the high street, for everybody. And the only thing that everybody knows how to do is go shopping. So people know you can just walk in and browse. Our shop doesn't have very much physical stuff. Instead, ideas are the product. So you can buy all of these extraordinary experiences." She describes the shop as being "like a sort of apothecary for the mind. Here's your concern; here are some ideas for it."
I decide to test this theory out. If I arrived in here saying, for instance, "My girlfriend's just left me", what would you prescribe? Howarth is ready with an answer: "We've got many things for the trials of love. If you were feeling poor we might sell you, for £5, Stendhal's Cures for Love. Or we might sell you a piece of fiction about somebody who had it much worse. Or we've got a lovely book called A Life of One's Own, which is about the need for solitude. We might say: 'Come on our Play course with us tomorrow, there'll be loads of chicks there.' But we'd probably just be nice to you and give you a cup of tea." Which seems fair enough.
The School of Life, 70 Marchmont Street, London WC1N 1AB, tel. +44 (0)207 8331010. www.theschooloflife.com