How to charge £135/hour with zero skills or overheads
This psychic must have seen me coming
#10. Psychic
It was hard to get scammed by a psychic.
I’d sent several emails and got ignored by all but one, whose reply informed me, in Comic Sans MS, that she would only do consultations over Zoom. I’d heard of remote viewing, but this was ridiculous. Perhaps using email was my mistake, and I should have telepathically transmitted my requests to the ether instead. It was all very disappointing.
So, as I barrelled down a country lane one afternoon, my eyes swivelled when they spotted a sign outside our local, announcing psychic readings in two weeks’ time. Maybe my request had been received by the ether. The pub was called The Gate - could it indeed be a gate to another dimension, to the unseen universe beyond Sophia’s obsidian veil? (No.)
On the night, I pulled up at the little cottage of a pub, bowed my head under the low wooden beams of the entrance, and sheepishly enquired where the psychic night was. The bartender jerked his ugly head1 towards a snug at the back. It was like a scene from the Twilight Zone - half a dozen slightly mismatched clones of Marjorie Dawes: all rotund and over fifty, with short, dyed hair and gaudy jewellery.
I sat on one of those green leather pub-chairs opposite a Marjorie. Mine was an affable French lady fiddling with a rose-tinted crystal. She told me she was a medium, but she looked more like an extra large.
She began by asking why I was there. I said, ‘You tell me.’
She sensed that I was going through a lot of change at the minute. It’s been about 2,500 years since Heraclitus noted that the only constant in life is change, but I decided to help her out, and agree that yes, in fact, I had recently moved house and had a baby.
She sensed that I had changed location and that my wife has taken a step back from work. Well, yes, I had changed location: I’d moved from a house in one location to a house in another location. I hadn’t moved to a different house in exactly the same location, like a dimension-shifting poltergeist, no. And it’s true that new mothers do tend to take a step back from work.
The conversation continued like this, with her making educated guesses and me, not wanting to be rude, being as helpful as possible.
She sensed that my wife and I had been together for many lifetimes. I said it certainly feels like it. She said we complement each other well. It was nice to hear this - it made me and my wife feel good when we discussed it on the car ride home.
We had wanted to do a reading together, but were told it wasn’t possible because the messages from the angels would get too defused. As I recounted the session in the car, Jasmine scoffed and chortled at the ridiculousness of her words. How silly it all was. I told her the psychic did like her business idea though – her head whipped round and her eyes lit up. ‘What did she say?!’
The psychic had said that the app would be successful – and she had spent at least ten minutes giving me business advice. She was telling me about the importance of NDAs, IP, and getting equity agreements in writing. I think she’d watched The Founder recently. If she was any good at business, she probably wouldn’t be giving psychic readings in the back of a pub in Harefield (mind you, at £45 for 20 minutes, she was more expensive than a therapist).
Regardless, it was good advice.
She’d given me some counsel about a close friend. She’d asked if I knew someone called Percy who’d passed recently. I said I hope not, I only saw him last weekend, although now that I think about it, he did look a bit peaky. She said that he was going through some stuff. I said no, not really, but another close friend called Dave is. She said, yes, that’s the one.
She told me I need to take him out somewhere and do something fun; I need to be a male friend he can talk to. This was a sound suggestion I endeavoured to act upon.
She told me to tell him the angels are sending him love and kind words. This was nonsense I endeavoured to ignore.
My French Marjorie may have been a bit of a kook, but she said some valuable things that resonated with me: be careful with your business ideas, appreciate your wife, and be a good friend. This might sound like basic stuff, but I needed to hear it, and no one else was saying it to me.
Not in this dimension at least.
My wife actually thought he was quite handsome and the two spent an hour alone talking while I visited the psychic but this is my book so there.