THERE'S this woman who keeps saying "If you want my advice..." and gives it, even though nobody on the face of it would ever seek her advice. She has made a monumental mess of her life in almost every way: the men she married are a rogue's gallery; you can hear her chest whistling and lungs coughing two streets away; and the amount of money she has lost would sort out a neighbourhood. Her children have all taken wildly unsuitable paths towards spiralling disasters of various kinds; her house is falling down; and she couldn't cook a meal to save her life. Why should anyone take her advice on anything whatsoever?
Yet oddly enough, we all do, more and more, because it so often turns out to be right. And since she has never applied any of this terrific common sense and insight to her own life... then why should it work for others?
Because she is interested in people, that's why. She is observant to the point that she could have been a spy. She was once a teacher and says that - all us ex teachers know it's a matter of "don't do as I do, do as I say". My heart has sunk when she says rhetorically "if you want my advice" and yet on the occasions I have taken this advice, it has invariably been a huge success.
I told her how tiring it was standing in stationery shops and lugging things home, yet I loved the whole feel of looking at things like economy packs of ultra white 100 gram paper and fibre filled recycled Jiffy bags in 25 different sizes.
"If you want my advice," she said - this woman who doesn't have one envelope or one stamp in her house - "you'd send for a catalogue, and order them by mail, they deliver in 24 hours.
I just didn't believe this, or if they did I thought they'd only deliver if you wanted enough for the Department of Foreign Affairs, not just for two desks. But out of politeness I went along with it and sent for a catalogue and it worked so well that - I think these guys are waiting outside the door with a van of supplies.
You spend happy hours drooling over the coloured markers, Post It pads and correcting fluids. Then you ring up or fax and order it, and a few hours later someone arrives and carts it right to your desk.
How did she know that it would work?
How did she, who can't boil water, know to put apple puree and curry powder into a terminally dull parsnip soup which I had spent hours making and which had tasted like a bowl of liquid woodshavings? She reads things like that, she says. They stay in her mind.
She who was so misguided about men that she could have written the manual, she knew, on their wedding day, that Charles and Diana's marriage was doomed. I remember thinking she was a real old sour puss, as I put on my wedding hat and went with thousands of cheerful, flag waving British people on that sunny day to St Paul's Cathedral. She, who is heavily horticulturally challenged in her own patch, said that if we wanted her advice we would plant mainly winter pansies in ours, something we have done now for years with gratitude though the first time it was done just to be polite.
I'M inclined to regard her a guru now and ask her all kind of things, like does she think the cat's eye is red enough to bring her to the vet or has she just had a late night? The advice giver has no thoughts on that - subject closed, the poor, pink eyed cat forgotten.
Or what kind of calcium tablets would stop your nails breaking or where would I get a mini bus to take eight of us to a wedding, or is there anywhere that there's a waste paper bank nearer than the big dump near Carrickmines?
She would look blank if you asked her any of these things and wonder how she should be expected to know, yet she could tell you a dozen absolutely invaluable things just when the fancy takes her. You have to wait until she comes up with her own entirely unexpected solution. She is not a problem solver on demand. You have to hope that she will develop an interest in cats or calcium or minibuses like she suddenly has in so many other unlikely areas
Nor indeed, it turns out, does she like advice from others. A friend gave her a voucher for a hair salon, and the friend is no longer a friend. A neighbour sent her own window cleaner to call just in case and that was the last of any neighbourly greetings. A relative wondered would she like to go to Colour Me Beautiful, a daughter suggested Uni Slim and a colleague advised a health farm. These people are now in her past and only the friend who brought the loan of a sheep for a weekend to eat the worst excesses of her garden, remains in the frame.
And yet in spite of all this she knows more than anyone else in my acquaintance about the ordinary things that can concern people. If only you manage to get a subject that has attracted her attention, she will know the answer.
In a world where the best selling non fiction books are all self help manuals, advice, and how to books . . . I just wish I could get her started. I have tried of course, I told her how these books - were literally ceiling high in shops all over New York, that customers were rushing in during their lunch hour to buy up other people's wisdom, other people's ways of coping with the world.
"Isn't it amazing, the hunger for information that there is out there, and how easy it would be to feed it if one only got down to it?" I looked innocently up at the ceiling as I spoke to take the harm out of it, to remove any nuance that I might be suggesting she get her act together.
My heart had nearly stopped in case I was going to go the way of those who had advised weight watchers, window cleaning and colour co ordination. But she has a selective deafness which comes in very handily from time to time. If ever I were to mention the matter again I would have to do so in a very subtle way, a more general way - in fact, as if I were talking to everyone rather than speaking to her specifically.
If I can think of a way to do that, I will.