The Good Life by Richard Seah

I started the newsletter after I left my job as a journalist with The Business Times, Singapore's only business newspaper, where I had worked for nine years, from 1980 to 1989.

It was during the course of my work at The Business Times that I was introduced to the idea of natural health... and which eventually led me to leave my journalist job and publish my own newsletter.

I mentioned to Han Vo-Ta that I was learning yoga but could not do the meditation and breathing exercises because my nose was perpetually blocked. He then pulled out a book titled Raw Vegetable Juices, by Norman Walker. And even though we had met for the first time that day, Hn Vo-ta offfered to lend the book to me.

To cut a long story short, the book changed my life by introducing me to natural health and eventually to publish The Good Life – although I would later find out that taking lots of juices and salads, as Norman Walker recommended, was not exactly suitable for me.

But I was so excited to discover the world of natural health. Shortly after, I began to write a weekly health column on the subject in the Saturday edition of the newspaper.

Increasingly, I found myself becoming less and less interested in my job as a business journalist. I felt some sort of a 'calling' to produce a newsletter on natural health.

And so I left my job in March 1989 and, in September, The Good Life was launched.

The name was inspired by the title of a British television comedy series that was being aired at that time, about this man who left his job to lead a more natural lifestyle – including keeping a goat in his backyard. Well, I did not have a goat, but I rather identified with the character.

The Good Life – as well as my newspaper column before that – was quite well received and many readers commended it highly.

It was a purist newsletter, with only editorial and no advertisements. This was partly because, back in1989, there were not many health products that I would endorse anyway and I felt it would not be right to carry advertisements of products that I did not agree with.

Unfortunately, The Good Life was a commercial failure.

I had thought that by self-publishing it, as a one-man operation, I could minimise my costs and earn a decent living without having to sell all that many copies. I figured 2,000 copies per issue would be enough to keep me going, and more would make me moderately rich.

I could not achieve even that and the highest number of subscriptions I sold was under a thousand. I slogged on for eight years, lost a lot of money and got myself exhausted from writing before I finally folded up The Good Life in 1997. All in, I published 61 issues, each ranging from 16 to 40 pages. All in, I must have written over a million words about natural health!

When I stopped The Good Life, I wanted to post the articles on the Internet. At that time, my web design skills were still very very basic. I put up a few articles and gave up after that.

Later, the Zip disks in which I stored my articles were damaged and I could not retrieve the articles. So finally, after 10 years, I got my friend Ella who happily agreed to type them out for a small fee.

It would take a few months, but I plan to have all the articles posted on this website by end-2007.

Since there are a few hundred articles in The Good Life, I will organise them by broad topics. Click on each of the topicsin the box on the right to access links to the articles in The Good Life.

Active links are bold and underlined. Right now (November 2007) there is only a few major sections that have been uploaded. More articles will be posted in the weeks and months ahead, so do check regularly for updates.