“To thine own self be true.” (Above the stage at Conway Hall)
Lady Gaga happy in the faux frog skin she's in
Green may be the new black, but what happens when green goes bad? I don’t mean when you go all OTT with the emerald velvet and wind up looking like Kermit the Frog. I mean green as a way of being, as in green-fingered, as in balanced and harmonious; the flipside of green as in pleasant, green as in good. I’m talking green as in envy. This was the question the School of Life was posing the other wild, wet and windy Sunday.
I was having a go at killing 2 birds with one stone, not literally of course. All sounds rather messy if you ask me, you’d need a big stone, for starters, the kind Wiley Coyote used to drop off cliffs to flatten Road Runner – speaking of which, there’s a lesson to be learned here: only stone a bird while it’s standing still and if you’re going for two, then maybe opt for something that’s not gonna move suddenly – think dodo.
So… anyway, the birds: The School of Life Sunday Sermon and My Cultural Life. The stone: Me turning up. Two different outfits I’d been meaning to tag along to in the same place at the same time – it just had to be done!
Satan's happy in the satin-lycra skin he's in...
Finding and meeting the My Cultural Life crew was easy enough; us early birds… escaped the elements and shivered with the rest of the philosophically curious flock in the foyer; under the all-seeing gaze of an improbably tall, improbably thin chap in a scarlet satin-lycra catsuit. Apparently this almost mythical man was no less than the legendary Johnny Satan, the Sunday Sermon’s minister-cum-compere.
Mr satin-clad Satan led us in a sing-a-long kinda hymn thing of that depressing Donnie Darko ditty Mad World, before introducing guest speaker, Oliver James, of Affluenza fame. Basically, OJ said envy = jealousy with claws on (aka the green-eyed monster). Well, he didn’t, I said that, but you get the idea…
"Surprise, surprise, Scylla!"
And if you don’t, then good old (ancient, in fact) Ovid gave us a damn fine demo of the destructive force of envy-in-action in his tale of Scylla, the water nymph – not the red ‘aired Liverpudlian songstress and host of Surprise Surprise, in case you were wondering. Glaucus, a minor sea god, had gone all Lady Gaga over sexy Scylla, but got seriously browned off when he failed to bag his babe. So who you gonna call? Well, not Circe the Sorceress, if this is anything to go by; cos, taking a shine to Glaucus herself, she decided to turn Scylla’s watering hole into a toxic hell hole, and poor Scylla into swamp thing. Eek!
The point is, envy is bad, not just for the envious, or the envied, but for everyone and everything. OJ laid the blame squarely at the door of capitalism and that crazy carousel ride consumerism. Keeping up with the Joneses and indeed coveting the Joneses stuff is basically the root of the fleurs du mal we call envy. The solution? The Scandinavian approach for one, apparently… And looking a bit closer to home – (1) feeling good in your own skin and (2) getting into your flow (ie, stuff you loved to do as child) as often as possible. Perhaps Circe should have tried fuzzy felts before resorting to poison?
The sermon concluded with tea and a slice of green-iced cake. Mr Satan urged the flock to have a chin-wag with a stranger over cha, but I felt that I was doing my bit by meeting up with the hitherto unknown My Cultural Life groupies. Honest. Actually, I harboured a desire to say something ground breaking to the marvellous Monsieur de Botton, who I’d seen swanning about the entrance hall. This was, oooh, the fourth time I’ve been a stone’s throw from my fave philosopher, but what to say? “I’m your number one fan?” No. So I said, nothing, again.
Speaking of procrastination and major lack of self esteem I was most intrigued by OJ’s brief reference to TS 
Eliot’s The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock. He reckoned it was a portrait of life half-lived and Prufrock, like all those scared of their own shadows, was likely to be struck by the green-eyed monster:
And time yet for a hundred indecisions,
And for a hundred visions and revisions,
Before the taking of a toast and tea.
In the room the women come and go
Talking of Michelangelo.
And indeed there will be time
To wonder, “Do I dare?” and, “Do I dare?”
Adventuress Undressed 