The start of all my suffering this year, and you might say the silliness, was being called “degrading” by my line manager because I related the story of the Buddhist monk who achieved Nirvana while taking a crap in a river. The story is told in Peter Matthiesson’s The Snow Leopard. I said that I look for Nirvana when I take a crap and indeed I had taken a crap that very day and looked for Nirvana. After months of what I considered emotional pollution from the said line manager, I tried to think of a suitable metaphor to communicate the idea of “the polluter pays” to the management. Of course, I had a problem with her, but she didn’t have a problem with me but then the polluted would have a problem and the polluter wouldn’t. But I didn’t want to describe myself as a fish in a river of industrial effluent because fish are governed by Pisces, which also governs the consequences of self-undoing and failure of duty. The metaphor which came to me was that the people who live downstream of a person who takes a crap in a river obviously have a problem whereas the person who crapped upstream obviously does not. It amazes me that the start and the end of my suffering should involve the same image. Last night I went into meditation, in an attempt to think deeply about what I had been reading in Education in the New Age, for a laugh I pretended to strain, as though I were trying. On reflection, isn’t the urgency with which one lives one’s life simply a call to stool? But divine crap or spiritual shite or any kind of celestial excrescence is gold by Earth standards. I have lived here 33 years and I raise my eyes to Heaven and say “Where there’s muck, there’s brass”.