Work

Reading is Fundamental

The problem with limiting myself to writing one newsletter a week is that so many things happen in my week. If I turned everything into a newsletter, nothing would get done, so patchwork is very much the style of 2025.

Having said that, this post is all about my new line of work. There will be another post shortly telling you about the progress with the house (very much Mercury in retrograde), progress with Oscar’s auditions (positive so far), and book updates. Now though, we turn to solemn thoughts of work.

I am psychic. I wanted to be psychic for years and was about as mystically inclined as a rock. It may sound weird saying that it was something I wanted, but I grew up in a family where being psychic was as normal as having brown hair, so it was frustrating for me that I didn’t have the gift. Unlike other people who were worried that they could see and know things because they thought they might be going mad, I felt very much a failure for not being able to see Great Aunt Agatha materialising out of the broom cupboard.

I have a new Substack which is all about what I do and how I came to do it. This Substack will continue with largely non-spooky matters, so if all this talk of psychic stuff makes you want to run for the hills, normal service will be resumed shortly, if you haven’t already run away, screaming.

At the age of twenty-seven, helping someone else understand how to read tarot cards, I got it. Just. Like. That. One minute I knew nothing. The next minute my head was full. For a hot minute that was as frustrating as not having ‘it’, because I didn’t know how to turn it off and knowing things about other people isn’t as fun as you might think. Just look at the cess pit that Facebook has turned into if you want evidence of that. The first thing I did then was find some courses on making myself more off and on-able (yes, these do exist). Then I started to work with ‘it’.

After a few years I decided to park it as a business. People were a lot less open to it then, and I got tired of people telling me that I was evil and that I would burn in hell. It does wear a body down. You can see why the Spanish Inquisition was so successful. Persistence does pay off. Also, it is my firm and unshakeable opinion that everyone can do this stuff to a greater or lesser extent. It’s about as mystical as doing the hoovering at bottom. You can dress it up in floaty scarves if you like, but they’ll only catch fire on your special candles, so think on.

Towards the end of it all, I got turned down for a job reading cards for being ‘frighteningly accurate,’ because apparently people don’t want that. That was a bit of a kick in the nuts. Nobody wants to hear that they could have got the job if only they’d have been a bit more shit in the interview.

I also got tired of selling myself short in terms of what I was charging. There was no lack of people who wanted my skills but there was a lot of reluctance to pay for them. When I started out I would work some evenings doing psychic suppers, which were all the rage then. You could have a three course meal and a hot and cold running psychic for about £30. I did them because it was a good way of schlepping my skills in front of a lot of people. It was a way of generating leads for proper clients. I would be paid £10 plus my own supper for a minimum of four hours work. At the end of the evening I’d have read for upwards of thirty people. It was not sustainable. My memories of that time are not about deep spiritual connection, they just involve a lot of sub-par roast dinners and indigestion.

When people did decide to come and see me for readings there was often a lot of push back over the price. When I politely suggested that they go elsewhere if they wanted something cheaper, there was usually an awkward silence followed by self-justifying anger at why they were allowed to ask me to work for pennies, even though it was specifically my skills they wanted. Other psychics were and are available.

The usual rule of thumb seemed to be that the less a person wanted to pay, the more demanding they would be as a client. I had to terminate one session where a woman became furious because I wouldn’t tell her whether she should put her cat down. Another woman found my home phone number and rang me at eight o’clock one morning to ask me if she should wear her lucky knickers for a job interview.

I gave up. For years I would only offer readings to people I knew and liked and I would do them for free, because nothing scars you like a woman who persistently wants to know what colour knickers to wear because she paid you cash money. I had a brief foray back into paid work when the children were in their teens but this time it was the demands of my impossible life that made it untenable. Now though, times are different and so am I.

I read tarot cards. Other methods of doing spiritual jiggery pokery are available to me (and you), but I prefer the cards. I don’t read cards like you imagine. I am not Jane Seymour winding around Roger Moore in Live and Let Die while a guy in a culturally inappropriate Voodoo hat juggles skulls in the background. Would that I were. Although if Jane Seymour lived in E14 she’d learn to put more vests on.

I don’t believe in a future you have no control over. I believe that the most powerful thing you can do for yourself is understand how you got to this moment, who you are in this moment and what that’s doing to the life that surrounds you now. Who are you? Why are you? Do you like who and where you are? If you don’t, what can you do to change it?

I read cards to bear witness to the best you there is. I read cards to empower you. I read cards to help you find the tools, the space, the perspective and the options you need to make yourself happier and your life a bit easier. I don’t tell you what to do. I tell you what is possible. My goal at the end of every reading is to make you feel validated and loved as a person, even if you don’t decide to do a single thing differently going forward. I want you to know that you are good enough, always and forever. I want you to leave a session with me feeling lighter, rested and more capable than you were when we started.

What I am not about is wild esoteric thinking and elaborate and proscriptive philosophies. I am not about ‘THIS is the way.’ I am more likely to reference Danny Dyer in a reading than I am to start quoting Rumi. On that note, Danny Dyer is turning out to be a surprisingly powerful force for good in the modern world. I think it’s his unapologetic and highly cathartic use of the word cunt.

I am not about ‘you will meet the man of your dreams on Tuesday.’ I do not do jokes about lottery numbers or horse races. The only thing I can say for certain is that one day you will depart this earth in as mysterious and ineffable a way as you entered it. I don’t know when that will be and I don’t want to know because it isn’t important. What is important is finding a way to live right now and to accept more love now and going forward, because love, it turns out, is the most important and enduring thing of all. Love is the glue that holds this whole, damn thing together.

I do not believe that we are descended from dolphins or that Atlantis is somewhere off the Isle of Sheppey. I am not about giving you forty five easy steps by which to break free of the shackles of oppression. There are no three rules, five hats or seven highly effective anythings. I don’t care about kale smoothies and wellness. I don’t care if you can’t stick your toe in your ear and empty your mind of all negative thought. My readings are not about the things you can do to punish yourself. I don’t hold with the idea that there should be less of you. A reading with me is not about learning to ‘do’ anything much. Mostly they are about holding space for the really quite spectacular person you already are and encouraging you to meet yourself with kindness. They are about finding ways to approach with gentleness the idea that maybe you’re already enough.

Finally I am not really about talking to dead people. You’ll want to see a medium for that. Dead people mostly want to be left alone in my experience. Life is for the living. Death is a strange country with its own agenda. Sometimes what I do means that someone may want to pop in and wave at you, but I don’t encourage it and I never seek anyone out who doesn’t appear of their own volition. If you want to know where the family silver is, you’ll have to ask Mystic Meg.

I am really good at it. I know you’re supposed to be modest, but fuck it, there are so many things I am terrible at I think I should be allowed to do a little toot on my own horn here. Toot, toot etc.

If you think you might want a reading after all that, I have a booking system, which offers a range of times, types of reading and prices. You can click this link to find it.