Edwin Drood's Column - Edwin: your personal guru for 2011

So, I’ve been doing this for a year now to a steadily expanding fan base of folk who either think I’m too sane to be true, too weird to be anything other than fiction or too sexy for my blog. It seems strange to have to admit that most of the people I write about are more real to me than the people I see on the news. Perhaps that’s because those in the news are seldom covered doing what everyone else does: “yet another evening spent with David Cameron watching YouTube reruns of Upstairs, Downstairs ...”

Occasionally someone mails me a word of praise, either mitigated with advice or undeservingly open-hearted. I am deeply grateful for all feedback. Even more occasionally someone writes to ask for my opinion on a knotty affair of state or even a personal question, since I’m such a (not surprisingly) unacknowledged expert on both. I’ve been working out a few stock answers that may fit different situations equally well:

You can’t over-rate coffee.

There is no lie so huge it won’t fit in a headline.

If your reputation has been ruined, it was the wrong reputation.

Don’t follow your heart. That route generally leads to a junk food binge.

If you have a problem with all those around you, then the problem is probably you.

If you want to make a career out of creativity, be prepared to jettison two-thirds of your production immediately. Two thirds will always be bad to rotten. And of the remaining third, only one third will be worth keeping.

Pearls are formed around a painful grain of sand. Go to the place where it hurts and write, think, play or paint your way out. If you can’t find the place where it hurts, then you either don’t care enough to empathise, or you’ve become too numb to feel. This in itself is a form of wound and can be used for creative growth.

Deconstruct yourself. Subvert yourself. Never try to emulate your own best work.

What we all need is more days in the week. How about nine, that’s a good number. Then you can take up tai chi or molecular cookery and still have time to inline skate, study late two nights a week, watch French films and take regular viola lessons.

Never, ever cry on public transport. It’s acutely embarrassing to everyone. No one deserves that.

There are few moments in life so good that they cannot bear the improvement of a good cigar.

If you’ve managed to become one of the people your parents warned you about, then they didn’t really do such a bad job, did they?

Apologise, apologise ... doesn’t matter for what and it doesn’t even matter if you’re innocent. Sorry is definitely the easiest word. There’s always a chance of a comeback after “sorry”.

So, you plagiarized your doctoral thesis: what else is new? Now do you want to know who your source stole from? OK, maybe not.

Fed up with speeding tickets? Empower your cautious side and fit spikes to your dashboard.

Waste not, want not: good advice. Want only what others have already wasted: even better.

Find something you like doing and get someone to pay you to do it. Yes, indeed, this might sometimes work. But if not, then find something someone else likes to do enough that they are prepared to pay you to watch from the sidelines and cheer. Cabinet posts are made of this.

Every man is a prophet in his own kitchen if not in his own country. Make your predictions vague enough to be certain of fulfilment. Don’t say that Rome will be struck by a major earthquake on May 11th 2011 in honour of the Drood’s first blogging anniversary; say “a Mediterranean nation”.