Colm Campbell interview, copyright Victoria Mary Clarke, 2003

          I officially have disastrous posture.  This, according to Colm Campbell, owner of the Back Shop.  The news doesn’t really surprise me, seeing as I do most of my work on a laptop, whilst slumped comfortably in an armchair, in bed or on a sofa.  None of these sitting positions  are what I would have though of as ideal for my health, but Colm insists that they are not only not contributing to the health of my spine, they are actively causing it to deteriorate.  This alarming news he is prepared to back up, (if you’ll pardon the pun).  As soon as I walk into his shop, on Dublin’s Exchequer Street, he asks me to sit in a specially designed chair, to see if I notice anything different.  And indeed I do notice that I am sitting upright, with my back supported, unlike the way I would normally sit.  In a chair like that, he says I would be able to write for eight or ten hours, without any discomfort.  He knows, because he wrote a novel, while sitting in a chair like that.
          The chair is one of his own designs and it is possible  to have a chair designed especially to suit the contours of my own spine, which is what Colm does for a living.  If you go on the internet and enter the words back pain relief, you will find the Back Shop listed, number six out of millions of entries.
Every single spine is unique, as unique as the human fingerprint and because of this, Colm has constructed an ingenious machine which measures the exact proportions of his customer’s backs.  While  seated in the measuring chair, a series of bars are slotted into place, along the vertebrae, charting the exact curve so that the chair which you end up with is exactly right for you.  And because sitting with bad posture is the main cause of back pain, getting the right chair for home and for work and even for the car can, according to Colm, alleviate most back pain.
          He should know, he speaks from experience.  He first began to suffer with back trouble while  still a teenager.  One day, he was playing rugby  when he felt a knee being planted in the small of his back, by another boy.  He did nothing about the injury and continued to play a lot of sports, but his back was always niggling at him.  Until one day, twenty five years ago, while he was working at the Irish Times and there was a telephone call.  He stood up to walk to the phone, which was ten paces away, took two steps and hit the floor.  He had ruptured a lumbar disc and was in dire trouble.  Into the ambulance he was bundled and off to hospital.  At the hospital, he made what he says was the wisest decision ever made by man, which was not to have the operation which was recommended.  His wife, -who was visiting when he made the decision-fetched his clothes and said lets go home.  Colm was in excruciating pain, but he was adamant that he didn’t want the operation.
‘There was a guy beside me in the ward, he was a cop and he was after having an operation.  When he came back, he said that the pain was worse than when he went in.  So I said “I’m not having this.  I’m getting out of here!”
Another factor that influenced his decision  to get out of there was, he says, the surgeon who told him to get out of bed and bend and touch his toes.  Which was something that he had never been able to do.  He had never even been able to touch his knees.
          The decision to take charge of his own treatment was one he never regretted.  In twenty five years, he says, he has never come across one successful back operation.
          ‘Thinking logically, I worked out that if I sat with perfect posture, I could eliminate the problem.  And I did.”  He began to experiment with making chairs which would totally support his spine, and they worked.
He has managed to eliminate his own back pain, with the use of his furniture and is able to play golf and live a normal life.  But he is baffled, he says, by the illogical way in which most people respond to the problem.
“ Eighty per cent of the world’s population suffers from back pain at some time or other.  The only people that I know of who don’t suffer from back pain are the Australian Aboriginals, because they don’t sit, they squat.  But what do people do about it?  Continue to sit with bad posture!
I would go so far as to say that ninety five percent of people who sit in offices all day are sitting with bad posture.  Most people arrange their bodies around their work, whereas they should be doing it the other way around.
          The chairs that Colm designs are being sold all over the world, but one of his first clients  was the Eastern Health Board, who approached him to make a chair for a forty two year old quadroplegic  who was living in Chapelizod.
“ They pleaded with me to come out and have a look.  The guy had been lying on the ground for forty years.  I had a crude measuring system at that stage, I hadn’t developed the one I have now, but they got him sitting up and I measured him and two months later, I delivered the chair.  And when I went back, he was able to sit up for the first time in forty years.”
          Aside from being an ingenious inventor of back chairs, Colm has a secret life as a novelist.  Neither of his novels have been published yet, but he outlines the plot of one of them, a fascinating and thoroughly well researched story about how a gang successfully forge US dollars with the intention of dumping them all over the country and messing with the economy.  I am not allowed to reveal just how they go about forging the money but Colm assures me that having investigated it with the same painstaking attention to detail that he applies to back pain, his method is foolproof. 
“I know a lot about counterfeiting,’he says.  “And I spent four years researching this book.  And I went to the Central Bank and I spoke to someone who held a very senior position there and told him what I was doing and he gave me a dozen reasons why it couldn’t be done.  I acted on each one and went back several months later and I had overcome each of the obstacles.  So he gave me some more reasons.  And I figured them out.”  He smiles, amusedly.
          “I have two philosophies in life,’ he says, as I’m leaving with my new car seat.  ‘One of them is if something works, leave it alone.  The other one is I can do anything I want!”
The Back Shop 32 Exchequer St, Dublin 2.  01 671 4215, www.back-shop.com