A very weird thing happened to me last week and it has completely changed how I feel about psychics. I was on a seven (ish) hour train journey from Bath to Edinburgh when it happened, and because it happened about midway through – circa Sheffield – I had a lot of time to mull it over. Poor signal and non-existent WiFi meant that I was largely alone with my thoughts, a situation I was not prepared for. I wasn’t prepared for the journey full stop, if truth be known: thanks to my overactive imagination I had envisaged this long distance train ride to be something akin to the Hogwarts Express experience. Quaint, filmic, moderately exciting. Dramatic scenery, sudden and alarming changes to the outside weather conditions. A train conductor with a hat on. A tuck shop. Gobstoppers. In my mind, I had imagined that we’d all climb onto a steam train, the other passengers and I, armed with our leather trunks (initialled) and hockey sticks and frogs in jam jars, and then a man with a large moustache would shout “all aboard” and toot toot, a whoosh of steam and off we’d go. In my mind, because I was traversing almost the entire length of the United Kingdom, which in itself is surely an usual, near-magical occasion, it would be a special, olden days train with those little partitioned off wood-panelled compartments in each carriage. I’d perhaps get stuck in a compartment with a man who incessantly smoked a pipe. Which would be mildly annoying, but there would be a woman in a feathered hat who would get on somewhere around Derby and she would flap her leather gloves around until he extinguished it.(Can you tell that I don’t live in the actual world, at all?)So yeah, it was something of a shock to get on what ended up being like any other train. Plastic seat-backs. Large windows that didn’t open. No pipe smoke or frogs in jam jars. I was mixing this train up with the Orient Express, I realised, the moment I stepped aboard and the door slid closed behind me. Easy mistake to make. Both go on long journeys through nice scenery. Ticket price was similar (not a joke). Anyway, there were three other people in the carriage, all women. And I quickly found out, because they never stopped talking, that one was a business consultant, one was a horse therapist and one was a psychic. Which sounds like the start of a bad joke, I know. A psychic, a business consultant and a horse therapist walk into a bar…Side-note: the horse therapist wasn’t a therapist for horses. Alas, she wasn’t someone who welcomed ponies into her office and got them to recline on her extra-large daybed so that they could tell her their woes. She was (I found out through carefully eavesdropping) a therapist for humans, who used horses to improve people’s mental wellbeing. I Googled it, it came up with the phrase equine-assisted therapy. And I wish she hadn’t clarified, this horse therapist, because for what must have been at least twelve utterly blissful seconds I wholeheartedly believed that she was a professional who spent her days helping horses to work through their emotional challenges. I had this picture in my mind:
