In this occasional series, Jamie Does…, I’ll be coming out of my mental, physical and spiritual comfort zones to take part in, learn about and experience all manner of lifestyles, rituals and activities. Pushing myself to my very limits; suffering in the pursuit of knowledge and self-growth; making myself look like a complete and utter bell-end. And hopefully making you bunch of sadists laugh along the way. This time: psychics.
As I sit at my table waiting for the psychic floor-show to begin, I realise two things: one, that I’m cold – there’s a draught skipping and dancing over my exposed skin – and, two, that I can hear voices, chattering and insistent. Could it be that the dead are already with us, lowering the temperature with their ghostly presence, and whispering on the peripheries? Well, no. There’s a simpler explanation. I’m in a pub in Grangemouth, and the heating is broken. And it’s full of regulars, hence the whispering. Which is less like whispering, and more like hushed shouting. But not so hushed. Yeah, they’re pretty much just shouting. Sorry I lied to you, but I needed to make my ghost-themed intro work.
The only thing separating those of us, like me, who are here for the spirits from those who are here for, well, you know, the spirits, but the drinkable kind, is an invisible partition; that and some reserved signs selotaped to the backs of our seats. I have a good look around. Everything about this special, ticketed event screams ‘cheap’. I hope that doesn’t mean we’re going to get commensurately cheap ghosts and psychic advice. (“Your third-cousin’s former best friend’s grandpa’s brother is here, and he says that blue doesn’t really suit you in a shoe.”)
The firm behind tonight’s voyage into the great unknown is Second Sight, who’ve come to Grangemouth from Paisley, which is a little like travelling from Chernobyl to… well, a different part of Chernobyl. I have a chuckle at their slogan: ‘The Alternative Experience’. Alternative to what exactly? Their mantra’s as imprecise as their craft. Maybe they’re offering an alternative to experience itself? ‘Come join us for a night of formlessness that may or may not have happened that one day soon you won’t remember anyway.’
Every table receives a little slip of paper that can be used to book a private reading later in the night. I laugh again when I see the disclaimer on the slip: FOR RECREATIONAL PURPOSES ONLY. Imagine if you read that phrase on the consent form for your bowel surgery. You’d evacuate immediately.
The pub I’m in used to be a church. Significantly more than half of its inhabitants are pissed. The environment seems sacrilegious enough as it is without angering God any further by attempting to commune with the dead. I wonder how cold it’ll be once the Almighty blows the roof off the place in a fit of Old Testament rage. It comes as something of a relief when I remember that God doesn’t exist. Or ghosts. Or psychic powers, for that matter.
Yes, folks, I’m a die-hard sceptic: an affirmed anti-religionist and pooh-pooher of the supernatural. I’ve no patience for folksy faith beliefs or witchy superstitions, which tend to have a deleterious effect upon common sense, the power of reason and a society’s ability to educate its young. I’ve always preferred to see the world through scientific safety specs rather than misted, mystical goggles. I can’t believe there are people out there credulous enough to believe not only that it’s possible to lay a twinkling fibre-optic cable across the cold canyon of death to have a wee blether with your dead granny, but also that the only people powerful enough to achieve this miraculous feat are retired dinner-ladies and mentally-ill hairdressers.
So what am I doing at a psychic floor-show, you may very well ask? That’s easy. I’m here to take the piss out of it. Here. In this very blog you’re reading now.
Where’s your inquisitive and open mind, Jamie? Ach, been there, done that, got the T-shirt (and the T-shirt says ‘I’m not doing that again, hence this T-shirt’). I’m with Richard Dawkins, Derren Brown, James Randi and almost every other sane-minded, rational thinker on this particular subject.
Still, just because I hold these beliefs in private and occasionally express my thoughts about it through the medium (forgive me) of this blog doesn’t mean that I have to be an absolute asshole to people who do believe these things when meeting them face-to-face. My politeness always over-rides my scorn. Well…
Almost always.
Tonight in this vast, cold space I’m surrounded on all sides by believers and ‘well-there-must-be-something-to-its’. Well, that’s what I believe, anyway. What a plot twist it would be if every single person here tonight, like me, was just here to take the piss. Anyway, I find myself reticent about revealing my true feelings to the rest of the guests, even under direct questioning. To which I’m soon subjected. A lively older woman sitting with her daughters at the table just to my right asks me outright if I’m a believer.
‘I’m a sceptic,’ I tell her, which is entirely true, ‘but I like to keep an open mind,’ I tell her, which is complete bullshit. At least where this stuff is concerned.
I ask her the same question in return. She admits to believing in ‘something’, but isn’t completely sold on psychics. Not all of them, anyway. Some are definitely better than others, she says. I ask her why she asked me about my beliefs, or lack thereof. Was I giving off sceptical vibes?
‘No,’ she says, ‘It’s just you don’t see many guys at things like these.’
She’s right. I’ve noticed the same. Audience and psychic alike are usually mostly female.
‘Why do you think it is that men don’t usually come to these things?’ I ask her.
‘I guess they don’t see it as a manly thing. Like all of this is women’s stuff.’
It’s an interesting perspective. I once talked with a professor of social psychology from Glasgow University about spiritualism, and asked him why he thought many more women than men believed in it. He thought that the impulse possibly stemmed from motherhood; that the ability to create life gave women stronger feelings about death, especially guilt and fear. A sincere belief in spiritualism and the afterlife can go some way towards rendering a mother’s anxieties moot. If all of this is real, then a woman isn’t bringing life into this world just to die. We all get to live forever.
The professor didn’t think it was a coincidence that spiritualism first took hold around the time of the First World War, when hundreds of millions of men – millions upon millions of sons – were sent to their deaths en masse in the most horrifying ways and conditions imaginable.
My deep and solemn thoughts are shattered by a sudden onslaught of music. The words boom out across the pub floor as an old man hobbles past my table on his way to the toilet for a shite: ‘YOU CAN DO MAGIC!’
We’re ready to begin.
The lead psychic takes to the stage. Well, to the floor. Stages are a bit too pretentious for Grangemouth. The psychic’s in late middle-age, and clinging fiercely to the last vestiges of her blondeness. Her accent’s a messy amalgamation of every single English regional accent ever uttered, past, present and future. I can detect a pinch of Scouse here; a dash of Ancient Saxon there; a sprinkling of Terry Tibbs from Fonejacker here. Mercifully, the Paisley brogue hasn’t rubbed off on her. ‘Bored’ and ‘angry’ isn’t a good tonal blend for a psychic to have.
Let’s call this lady Tibbs going forwards so we don’t get confused between her and the other lady. ‘Other’ singular. There are supposed to be three psychics here tonight, but Tibbs explains to us that the third fell ill, and had to pull out at the last minute. Those unforeseen circumstances are a bitch, right? I post this joke on Facebook, and someone on my feed asks me never to do this awful joke ever again. It’s hacky, yeah, but what can I do? It’s not really a joke. It happened.
Unfortunately, it’s the spiritualist medium portion of the triumvirate who’s sick, and if we’re all honest with ourselves – believer and sceptic alike – the medium’s the one we’re here to see. They’re the most entertaining and potentially hilarious of the bunch.
Instead we’ve got Tibbs and her tarot cards.
I’ve never understood the allure or indeed the point of Tarot; why it satisfies people so much. ‘Pick a card, any card, and I’ll stitch together a set of generic probabilities and parcel them up to you like a warning from some supernatural under-writer at a ghost insurance company.’ I could do Tarot, and I wouldn’t need any fancy schmancy cards, either. I’d just do it with a normal deck of playing cards.
‘Ah, the six of clubs. That’s an interesting one. It means you’re going to enjoy some lovely long walks on the beach, and maybe come into some money. Ah, joined by the nine of diamonds. Oooh, bad luck, your sister’s going to die. That’ll be forty quid, please.’
Stand-ups occasionally have to deal with hecklers: boorish loudmouths who think that their obnoxious, booze-fuelled banter is a boon for their act, and almost certainly a gift to comedy itself. This is the first time I’ve seen a heckler at a psychic night. There’s an older lady, big stern specks and shark-like eyes, and built like an angry ostrich, who’s loudly objecting to almost everything that happens. Her mostly incomprehensible outbursts are accompanied by shushes from one of her two nieces who are sitting across the table from her. ‘Come oan, Aunty Mary!’ they keep saying, in an exasperated, though amused, tone.
Aunty Mary’s having none of it. Like a naughty child, each rebuke only fuels her mischief. If she isn’t downing and slamming pints, she’s laughing hysterically at nothing in particular, or barking out half-words like a dog with a brain injury. She turns around and shouts something at the old lady sitting at the table just in front of mine: ‘How dae ah ken you? Dae a ken you fae somewhere?’ The old lady just sort of shrugs, looking visibly grateful that she doesn’t actually ‘ken’ this cackling, pint-slamming she-beast.
Mary ups the ante: each time the psychic asks the audience for a round of applause, Mary spins around, pulls an angry face and gives her the fingers ‘behind her back’. I have to keep biting my lip. This shit is hilarious. But I really don’t want to catch Mary’s eye. Easier said than done because she keeps turning round to stare at me. It’s unnerving. Like being watched by a giant owl. I feel like I should’ve given my six pounds admission to her: ‘An Audience with Aunty Mary and Friends: a night you won’t forget, an evening she’ll never remember.’
Meanwhile, Tibbs keeps calling up volunteers and shuffling out supernatural wisdom. She tells one young woman the cards want her to leave her boyfriend; she advises a middle-aged woman she’ll be going to a funeral in the next four months, and she pleads with a young man to sit down more often if he’s feeling tired. If the other side of the existential plane is this achingly dull, I’ll gladly choose oblivion over eternal life; even reincarnation into the body of a scrotal tick would be better. No wonder Mary keeps giving Tibbs the loco sign.
And no wonder Mary doesn’t come back after the first break. I’m devastated, but I can’t blame her.
I head to the bar for another coffee, and come back to my table to jot some things down in my notebook. The lady at the adjacent table, who earlier asked me about my beliefs, now asks if I’m a journalist. I tell her about my blog. I give her the URL and she taps it into her phone. She looks down, shakes her head and smiles. ‘You’re here to take the piss, aren’t you?’ I smile back and shrug.
Our next psychic powerhouse is played to the stage, with ‘THOSE HEALING HANDS!’ booming out across the half-empty pub. Everybody looks thoroughly underwhelmed as a plump, haggard and deeply fed-up old woman slowly staggers towards the microphone. She doesn’t exactly fit the song: a dying walrus crawling towards the stage to ‘Rage Against the Machine’ would somehow feel less incongruous. This lady looks like she’d be far more comfortable having a wee sit down, a cup of tea and an empire biscuit by a three-bar fire than embarking on an exhausting mental battle against the dead.
I look around and smile to myself. This could be bingo night at an Old Folk’s Home (it really could be – we’ve already been sold raffle tickets). I feel like I’m inside an episode of Phoenix Nights, but I’m the only one who realises how funny it is.
‘Hello,’ says the ‘psychic’ (and I don’t have inverted commas big enough to place around that word), and the energy in the room is so palpable you can almost feel it. Her laconic Paisley drawl has a soporific quality. I’m convinced that the dead are only drawn to this woman because they see her as a kindred spirit. It might be worth checking for a pulse, or calling an ambulance.
Or the Ghostbusters.
Suddenly, she’s got a bunch of coloured ribbons in her hand. I’ve never heard of coloured ribbons being used to commune with the spirit realm before. It seems pretty arbitrary. What next? A packet of boiled sweeties? A basket filled with dead octopi? A tub of grout with Smarties sprinkled over it?
One by one, audience members file up to the front, take a ribbon, and sit down again as Paisley Pat throws out some ghost-talk. ‘Who’s got the heart problem?’ ‘Have you decided where you’re aw goin’ fur Christmas Day?’ ‘Are you going on holiday next year?’ I start to wonder if this is a psychic floor show or a fucking haircut.
A group of guys of student age, and appearance, are sitting together at a table fifteen feet or so up the hall from me. One of them has long hair and a grungy T-shirt. Another looks like the kind of guy who enjoys speciality ales and long games of Dungeons and Dragons. The last one looks a little like Andrew Cuanan meets Chandler by way of Seth MacFarlane. When they first arrived in the pub I couldn’t work out if they were full-on believers or sarky sceptics like me. I thought the long-haired guy looked like he might be into druidic runes, or carving spells into his skin with a sharpened thigh-bone, but Chandler and his ale-drinking pal didn’t fit my half-arsed profile.
I watch Chandler now as he’s listening to the ribbon lady, and I see an unmistakable smirk work its way over his face, the same one I’ve been fighting to conceal almost the whole time I’ve been here. I see you, Chandler. It’s especially obvious when he volunteers, and has to fight a laugh as the psychic tells him that he’s got immense psychic powers, too, and he should go to his local spiritualist church, as there’s a message waiting for him there. BT Callminder from beyond the grave. That’s some service.
Before the second and final break, Tibbs come back to remind us to fill out a dream card and pop it up on the stage so she can interpret them for us in the final section. Because I’m unashamedly me, I can’t resist jotting down a dream heavily suggestive of sexual deviancy and mescaline. “I have a recurring dream,” I start to write, “that I’m being chased by a wolf with the face of a budgie that just keeps shouting ‘My milkshake brings all the boys to the yard’. My penis falls off and I wake up wet.”
I’m surprised at myself for keeping it so clean.
I go over to Chandler’s table as the break begins. I want to enlist the students’ help in coming up with lots of weird-ass dreams for Tibbs to interpret. I was right about Chandler. We share a laugh about some of the evening’s more ridiculous elements, i.e. every single moment of it.
The final section begins. The ribbon lady from Paisley is off in a side-booth giving private readings for £40-a-pop, the psychic equivalent of a lap-dancer. Tibbs is back in charge. She picks up a piece of paper, reads the dream to herself and laughs like a tittering schoolgirl.
‘I don’t think I can read this one out,’ she says, almost blushing. Good work, boys, I think to myself. You must have come up with a cracker there. Tibbs apologises for the filth that’s about to fall out of her mouth, then proceeds to read it aloud. ‘I have a dream,’ she says, ‘that I’m being attacked by butt plugs.’
You can almost picture Martin Luther King up there, can’t you?
I find out later that it wasn’t Chandler who wrote this one, but a bunch of women who were sitting next to him. Those heroes.
‘What does it mean?’ I shout, when Tibbs seems reluctant to delve.
‘Well,’ she says, ‘When you have a dream like this, it means that you’ve got something inside of you, maybe a thought or a feeling, that you’re trying to keep inside, that you don’t want to let out.’
‘But what if the person dreaming the dream is Elton John?’ I holler out from the back of the pub.
Chandler bursts out laughing. A few people snigger.
‘That would be an organic dream,’ replies Tibbs, matter-of-factly.
‘An orgasmic dream you mean!’ shouts the woman to my right. The place ripples with laughter.
This is what I came here for tonight. To be the bad boy up the back of the class, causing a rumpus and generating plenty of material.
Tibbs reads out my dream next, the one about wolves and willies and milkshakes. She tells me it means I’ve got trust issues. She’s right about that. After all, I just paid seven pounds to two old women because they said they could speak to the dead, and then spent three hours watching them shuffling cards, twanging ribbons and reading out bits of paper.
And do you know what? I’d do it all again. What a world. What a town.