Ian Wood: Mind gurus are not to be scoffed at

LAST week's amazing story of the pirates who swiped a fully-laden tanker somewhere near the Seychelles was rendered even more amazing when BBC Radio 4 wheeled in a piracy expert to provide a bit of background.

What were we about to hear? Instinctively, my ears strained to pick up tell-tale signs – the odd har-harr, a parrot's screech, the sinister thump of a wooden leg on a pitching deck. Rather sadly, it didn't work out like that and if we hadn't been told what he was, the gentleman in question might have been discussing market trends or celebrities coming to grief on dance floors.

Still, full marks to him for making good in what must be a pretty unusual field. How long, it has to be asked, had he been hanging about waiting to be called in to comment on a spot of piracy – and how does he keep himself occupied between dastardly deeds at sea? Actually, I don't know why his arrival on the scene should have struck me as so unusual. There is, apparently, a lot of piracy about and it's perfectly logical for there to be people eager to keep an eye on things and report on what's happening.

It just goes to show what a boring outlook I've developed over the years. Since the piracy expert cropped up, I've been driven to try to recollect other occupations which have made me halt in my tracks and the answer is: not very many. I once golfed regularly with a man who told me after many weeks that he was a worker in tapestry. I was extremely taken with that, probably because he was, and remains, the only tapestry worker I've ever encountered.

Then, there were two men I met while staying in a St Andrews boarding house during an Open championship and who turned out to be tuners and restorers of pipe organs of the massive type found in cathedrals and so forth. I remember thinking to myself at the time – and this is an alarming indication of how limited my thinking had become – that they didn't look anything like tuners of cathedral organs. Looking back on it now, it's difficult to say what I expected organ tuners to look like.

On the golfing front, probably the most remarkable group to show up in recent years have been the gurus, the mind conditioners, who get in among the brain cells of their susceptible subjects and attempt to lead them out of the darkness. One such guru held Thomas Levet in thrall as the 2002 Open Championship headed for a four-way play-off at Muirfield.

Levet, who would lose out to Ernie Els in what became sudden-death after Steve Elkington and Stuart Appleby had bowed out in the play-off, had earlier watched the finish of regulation play and was caught by the TV cameras standing near the last green, hand-in-hand with his guru. Watching the pair from the commentary box, Peter Alliss found it all too much for him, switched on a Transylvanian accent and crooned: "Let me tike you to a secret plice," or words to that effect. There was more in this vein in what became a masterpiece of TV golf commentary.

But it's easy to scoff. The mind is a tricky area. Only the other day, when leaving my flat, I came across a note left by a thoughtful neighbour warning me that windows in the block had been freshly painted and shouldn't be touched. The effect was extraordinary. I was immediately seized by an insane desire to touch the newly-painted window frames.

I've lived at the same address for the best part of 30 years and have never, knowingly, touched, or been remotely tempted to touch, a window frame outside the confines of my own flat. Now, when expressly requested to avoid touching window frames because they'd been painted, I could hardly keep my hands off them. I had become gripped by an overwhelming compulsion to assure myself that the windows had, indeed, been painted and that the paint was still wet. Eventually, by resorting to a Hogan-like resolve, I managed to clear the building without so much as a smear, but it was a close-run thing.

There was an outbreak of mind-related golf books some years ago and one of the most successful of them (it wasn't so successful that I can remember its name) fell into the hands of a golfer I knew well and into whom I ran while wandering through town. It was like running into the Ancient Mariner. I'd have beaten my breast if I could have got my arms free.

Eyes glittering, he told me of this book and of the effect it had had upon him and his golf. It had, he said, been a life-changing experience and things, for him, would never be the same again. As he ranted on, I was beginning to think it had done much the same for me and I hadn't even read it. The next time I met him he seemed drained and rather subdued. I asked him if the book's magic was still working. He regarded me bleakly and changed the subject with a speed which told me all I needed to know.