LUCKY DEVIL?

SquareOne News Feature

by Chris Hammond

After having been tipped off by Kate about the imminent clampdown on the fortune telling industry, SquareOne decided to send me 'deep undercover' in an attempt to expose some so called supernatural shenanigans as a scam.


I'll be honest I was champing at the bit to get stuck into this. I've always viewed the whole spiritualist-psychic world as being dreary, distasteful and openly exploitative. But then cadging cash off some people is fair game, that's how things work yeah? Yeah, but the bereaved, emotionally unstable and irredeemably thick are generally speaking not fair game, despite being predominantly the main custom of clairvoyants, tarot card readers and psychics. Fancy a chat with your dead husband? Insecure enough to believe you'll find true love in 13 days time? Dumb enough to think that everyone born on the same day as you displays the same inherent character traits?


Think I'm being flippant do you? Go and watch Baby Mind Reader, Colin Fry, Have I Been Here Before or any of the psychic television that floods the schedules and judge for yourself. Better yet see the link below for more:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2xGZnRgfTCo


Anyway, I was very careful to chose a highly respectable tarot reader for my visit, one with glowing references and lots of nice things said about them. Surely they'd give me an accurate forecast? Putting my fair-minded cap on I took a seat in their glorified mystic cupboard to have the next year mapped out for me.


I'll say this, she only asked me three direct questions. What is your name, when is your birthday and what do you do? I barely spoke for the ensuing session. So grudgingly I had to put aside all ideas of this being a barrage of confidence tricks; my tarot reader genuinely didn't seem to need my input.


The reading took part in three stages. An assessment of my character, a month by month fortune forecast and the answer to one single question. The first part I couldn't possibly comment on suffice to say it was ambiguous; whilst the second and third points I will document in a fortune diary - the first installment of which will be due at the end of April.


I'll say this despite my initial (and so far continued) scepticism and cynicism about the industry and its practices, it doesn't look like I'll be able to involve trading standards in quite the way I had first hoped. In fact I'd go as far as to say if April continues to pan out the way it has for me my tarot reader will have been eerily accurate . . .