An interesting lunch

I popped in to see my friend S one lunchtime last week. On the spur of the moment, as I drank the last of my cup of tea, I asked him to do my Tarot cards. He re-appeared with a pack of cards and a bag of rune stones.

Now, I must stress that I am not the sort of person who would dream of living their life though what cards 'say'. When I was in my early 20s, my friend Hannah and I would often visit the readers that sat in a small room in a corner of Covent Garden. Our futures, depending on who we saw (we always went in together) varied. However, there was one woman, Vivian, who was spookily acurate. With her northern vowels and her mad, reddish-orange hair, she looked scatty and scattered. But her unlikely tale of Hannah's life to come was remarkably accurate.

For me, well, she seemed to know what line of work I was then tied up in, what I'd succeed in, mentioned 'publishing' and 'using my writing to do things to make health better for people' and so forth. Both of those happened. I can't recall what she said about my personal life but everyone I ever saw said there were two sons, "if I chose to have children" (I don't have children at the moment).

My friend identified a few situations that one could argue he may have known about anyway. But there were some themes recurring from when I read my own cards some weeks ago. My health and work came up and so did several people, one of whom had been hard work at work (and is in the past). The rune I picked tied all of the cards together into a neat package of: "Look after yourself, things will change, and don't succumb to extremes of behaviour".

Then, he told me about a past-life regression he had had. It started out with cynical comments – S not knowing what the point of him sitting there was, him being totally aware of what was going on and therefore couldn't be being properly hypnotised – and evolved into a tale of changes in his body as he sat on the sofa... sensations and the sounds of being shot at, and possibly dying, that were so odd and real that I was alarmed and fascinated in equal measure.