Psychic Fayre

It was in a small church hall type place in Essex on a rainy day that there was Reiki in one corner, and spiritual healing in another corner and there were push chairs, and an abundance of little children saying "Look Mummy, another Buddha". There were tables groaning under the weight of pewter fairies covered in glitter and resin castings of wizards and witches and row upon row of dreamcatchers. Everyone was miserable and even the healers held packets of fags behind their backs with their ordinary, often empty, wallets. There was a table covered in sad little paper plated portions of squashed SunBlest sandwiches with Bernard Matthew translucent ham and a slice of swiss roll under cling film.

I've never seen so many overweight women wearing huge pastel Tshirts with pictures of winsome fairies on them. People thumbing furiously through crystal healing tomes in search of mystical cures that supposedly lie in pieces of rock as lumpy as themselves. There was a woman on one table who, for £10, would draw your spirit guide. Each person's spirit guide looked oddly similar, flattish, with tiny eyes in the style of a budding GCSE level artist drawing her friend's faces on the cover of an exercise book. The woman herself had sparkling eyes but she never smiled. There was a woman all in purple pyramid-selling anti ageing skin cream and cures for M.E. with carefully laminated "before" and "after" photographs. Almost everyone was all in purple, and all the tablecloths were purple, including mine whose previously "unusual" dusty lilac velvet paled next to the screaming purples around it.

I was there to sell jewellery, and not much in the way of jewellery sales happened but I did have to listen to a lot of people with upsettingly vague ideas. I came away with an impression of a group of people clutching at straws, desperate to believe in something Other, rejected by mainstream religion and medicine, on the edges, and I couldn't understand a single one of them.