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I’m a rational person. Of course I don’t believe in the psychic world. And yet … | Emma Brockes
Indoctrinated by my mother, who used to visit ‘Mr Trevor’, I find myself speculating to my own children about ‘energies’
When my mother was in her 20s and living in London, she visited a psychic at his home in the suburbs. He had done some healing work for her friend Carla, a basketball player, who after an injury had had some success with Mr Trevor where traditional physio had failed. That was his name – Mr Trevor – and as my mother would tell me every time the story was wheeled out, he was a “retired postmaster” and a “very humble man”. In other words, not a charlatan. I recall looking through her address book after her death, and there he still was, under the Ts. He must have been long dead by then too.
It was the story of Mr Trevor that softened me up for a lifetime of susceptibility to woo-woo spiritual nonsense, something I can apparently disparage without ever quite letting go. The psychic world is 99% baloney, and approaching a medium the last resort of the desperate. These people exploit the grief-stricken and clog up police investigations with false leads. I know this, as all rational people do. Yet, while in my own 20s, I went recreationally with friends to a medium, and I can’t remember a thing about it save for how much we laughed afterwards. There is Mr Trevor, telling my mother she would have one child, a girl, with “long fingers, like a starfish”, then coming over all funny and croaking out a phrase her dead father used to say to her as a child. I have nowhere to put this, except under the heading Things I Know to Be True That I Know Not to Be True.
Emma Brockes is a Guardian columnist based in New York. She is the author of She Left Me the Gun: My Mother’s Life Before Me
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