So it’s All Hallows Eve again…or
Hallowe’en (apostrophe please, people…apostrophe!) as it’s more commonly known. And as such, all the usual ‘trick-or-treat’ paraphernalia
is strewn around like a procession of odd socks escaped from the laundry, this
year with a few genuinely scary additions. I’ve always been interested in the adaptations
made to ‘normal’ products for various seasons and made-up events, but the winner
this year goes to Cadbury’s ‘Screme Egg’, complete with green gooey filling. See what they did there? The fact that I HAD to buy and try one as
soon as I saw them doesn’t mean Cadburys’ little marketing ploy was effective
at all…oh no (though I did hope they weren’t actually normal Crème Eggs that
had been sitting around for so long they’d turned ever-so-slightly radioactive).
So anyway; this being the day on
which talking about dead people and scary unexplained phenomena is almost mandatory, I read an article in the
paper in which two psychics were tested on their abilities to genuinely communicate
with the dead and provide readings for test sitters. Now I’m certain you’re waiting with bated
breath for the results of said test, which came back as… (drum roll, please!) …inconclusive,
with results leaning towards the fact that the two ladies probably didn’t have
psychic powers. Now, as you’re reeling
back with shock at this revelation, let me just state that in my personal
opinion, practical science and psychics don’t mix.
Exactly the same correlation can
be made between science and religion; in particular the offence taken by some people
regarding psychics “exploiting the
vulnerable”. Religion does this just
as well, as I discovered at a funeral of a once-close friend a few years
ago. The vicar was at pains to let us
all know that she was now “at peace, in
the arms of Jesus” and as he said this I felt a strange, angry feeling of
indignation rise up inside me at the notion that we were all supposed to just
accept this explanation as being a) the undisputed truth, and b) that being
gripped in the arms of Jesus for eternity was automatically what everybody
wanted. When I was a lot younger, I
asked my Dad what happened if you were a good person but you didn’t want to go
to Heaven and you didn’t actually like
God and Jesus all that much. Dad said,
to his credit, that he had no idea (he also asked me to pass him the Valium). But for all my indignation, the church and
religion in general are symbols; they
provide some often much-needed comfort to people who are generally free to use
it as they want to.
I had a spell of visiting a
psychic lady every year from the age of nineteen up until quite recently, when
I decided I didn’t need that spurious depth of reassurance that my life and I were
going to be generally “OK”. For me, it was simply time to grow up a
bit. But I have been incredibly grateful
that that option was there for me to make use of, absolutely regardless of
whether or not any of it was actually, scientifically, proven as ‘true’.
I very much enjoyed Christopher
Brookmyre’s ‘Attack of the Unsinkable
Rubber Ducks’ and AL Kennedy’s ‘The
Blue Book’; both of which explore the relationship between vulnerable
people and psychics. Yet I would argue
that we’re all vulnerable because life makes us that way, and that we make use
of the things around us to explain and circumvent that vulnerability. Psychics, religion, astrology, spirituality, ghosts,
fairy tales…they’re all part of a rich smorgasbord of things I’m glad exist in
our minds. I like the fact that we have
created ambiguous explanations for lives and potential afterlives that are already
ambiguous enough as it is. It’s very
human and very flawed, and to my mind, for that it’s also rather lovely.
Happy Hallowe’en!
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