Meet the man who says he has written the next chapter of the Bible
Always love a new prophet.
I'd love to get a list of this guy's "predictions". While he probably doesn't claim to predict anything, any foretelling of the future with any detail allows you to derive predictions.
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http://www.thisisleicestershire.co.u...l/article.html
It's the next chapter of the Bible – written by a cabbie in Ibstock. Yup, that's what we thought, too. We sent a sceptical Lee Marlow along to investigate
Before we start, a word of caution. This is the most outlandish story you will read today. In fact, scrub that. It is probably the most outlandish story you will read this week. Possibly this summer.
It's the tale of a taxi driver from Ibstock who claims to have written the next chapter of the Bible.
We won't really blame you if you turn over now. Believe us, we wondered whether we should interview him. After we had interviewed him, we wondered again whether we should print it.
The indisputable facts are these: Jim Boughey is a cabbie. He is 62 and lives in a bungalow, in Ibstock, with his wife, Linda, and his two lovely little spaniels.
Jim is a little, cheery kind of chap with severe arthritis, which has left him with a slight stoop and a shuffle when he walks.
He has written a book. It's a spiritual one: a user's guide to life, the universe, the parallel universe and everything else in between.
If you ever wondered what It was all about, Jim, who takes people to and from the airport in his luminous orange Vauxhall Astra taxi, says he has the answers.
The book is called The Serenity Papers – A Message for Mankind.
"This is God's blueprint for transforming your life," says Jim. "It's like the next chapter of the Bible. It will change your life forever."
You can buy it, if you want. It's an e-book, which seems to retail at $19, which is round about £12.
We say "seems to" because Jim is not sure.
"My business partner set up the price and did all the marketing," he says, "so I'll need to check on that."
It's one of many answers Jim gives us during our interview that doesn't quite stack up.
W e meet on a cloudy August morning. It's spitting with rain, but it's warm in a sun-will-come-out-tomorrow English summer kind of way.
Inside Jim's bungalow, though, it's sweltering. It might be August, but the heating is on. Come in, he says, and he ushers me into his bedroom. In all my time as a journalist, I've never interviewed a man in his bedroom – nor, for that matter, have I interviewed a man who claims his book is the most important tome of the past 2,000 years.
In next to no time, as I sit next to the bed in which Jim and his wife have just slept, I start to sweat. The interview begins.
Jim left school at 15 with no qualifications. He did all sorts of jobs before completing two Open University degrees.
He tells me this with almost indecent haste, as if to establish his intellectual credentials. But it's not his intellectuality that I find myself questioning as he tells how his book came to be written.
In January 2008, Jim received a letter in the post. Inside, he says, was a note and a key to a train station locker somewhere in the UK. Jim refuses point blank to say where.
In the whole scheme of things, it doesn't matter. It's not important. But the more he won't tell me where it is, the more I want to know.
In that locker he found two notebooks. They contained what Jim humbly believes to be the most important literary work of recent times, a real-life Da Vinci Code which will help us unlock the meaning of life.
That's a bold claim, Jim.
"Scientific people don't seem that happy with it," he admits. "But spiritual people are much more open to the book's message."
The notebooks were written by a man also called James. Jim, unhelpfully, doesn't know who James is.
James, apparently, was sitting in car when a strange light hovered above him. Then... piff, paff, puff. He remembered no more.
He woke two days later. His shirt was bloody, his knuckles raw and his face was bruised. Beside him were the notebooks. Inside, in James' own handwriting, was the essence of the Serenity Papers; a Doomsday scenario of the end of the world, told by a visitor from our future.
Earth will be wiped out, he said. Civilisation would crumble because of greed and disease. Not just any kind of disease, but a kind of flu pandemic, which is reassuringly topical. Only the notebooks could save us. James – there was no surname, no address, so it could be James May, James Martin from Saturday Kitchen or on-loan City midfielder James Wesolowski – left them in a railway locker and posted the key to Jim Boughey, a man he had never met, who lives in Ibstock.
So it was up to Jim to save the world.
Hmmm, I say.
"I know", says Jim. "It sounds unlikely, doesn't it?"
You could say that, Jim.
So where are the notebooks? The notebooks are not here, he says. He burned them.
"I had to," he says, straight-faced. "The notebooks told me to." A pig flies by the window.
V isitors to the website set up to sell The Serenity Papers are promised "the untold secrets of the universe". Simply click on the Order Now button, pay the fee – whatever it is, precisely – and you can find out if ghosts exist, whether animals have souls and "the amazing truth of what really happens when you die".
In reality, it's a familiar if far-fetched saga of UFOs, time-travelling and pestilence, with a bit of self-help guff thrown in for good measure. It comes over as a mash-up of Stephen King, Deepak Chopra, The Time Traveller's Wife and a bad episode of the X-Files, dotted with homespun cod psychology about life, love, death and self-fulfilment.
The tenses skip merrily all over the place and, even though Jim talks reverentially of the sacred text he picked up from a railway locker, he later admits that he fleshed some of it out himself to make it "more palatable."
I want to know what Linda – his wife of 34 years – thinks.
She spoke to me briefly before Jim ushered me into the bedroom. She seemed nice.
"She doesn't really read many books," says Jim.
But, nonetheless, she must know about the book you've been working on – what you say is the most important literary document of the past 2,000 years.
"No, not really, no," he says. "I don't think it really interests her and I want to protect her from this."
Jim is wise enough to admit that when this comes out, there's every chance people will think he's a little bit mad or, worse still, David Icke.
"But I had to do it," he says. "To be honest, I don't know for sure if it's true. It could be a hoax. But why would someone do that?
"I wrote it," he says and he means this, he really does, "because I felt I had to write it."
Jim is now working on other books and hopes to set up the Serenity Foundation, a secular group, open to all, which will help with lasting health, wealth and happiness. Become a member and you, too, can avoid the looming pandemic and make something of yourself.
Only two per cent of people actually become successful, says Jim, more than once. This book can help you do that.
The author of the notebook advises Jim that he should "take for himself a reasonable profit."
Handy that, eh Jim?
"Well, that's nice. But it's not about profit," he says. "It's about helping people," he insists.
"This book is a force for good. And whether you believe it or not, that's no bad thing is it?"
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