Country Mouse
Mary and I have spent much of our lengthy relationship ‘trapped under the same roof 24/7’ (in her words).
Mary is a temperamental sort, so I have never taken too seriously her regular accusations that my multiple character faults indicate that I ‘literally need to see an exorcist’.
Nevertheless, I have always been interested, in a quasi-scientific, Rupert Sheldrake sort of a way, in the paranormal. So the prospect of an ‘energy and past-life healing session’, conducted by chakra expert Georgia Coleridge on the cottage – and perhaps even on ourselves – piqued my interest.
The healer’s own interest had been piqued by her remote reading of a floorplan of our cottage – contained in our recent The Diary of Two Nobodies – in which she recognised the telltale signs of blocked energies.
These might typically comprise a raft of different problems, including nature spirits or imprints of the moods of past personalities. You will not hire Georgia unless, at the very least, you admit the possibility of reincarnation.
‘Georgia’s offered to come and cleanse the cottage,’ said Mary.
I immediately started channelling Kenneth Williams by suggesting that on her arrival I should arm her with an apron, Marigold gloves, a bucket of bleach and a scourer, and frogmarch her into our not overly clean kitchen. Cue Mary to interject, ‘NOT CLEANING… CLEANSING… spiritual cleansing, you silly chump.’
But I went along with it. It seemed a harmless, Gwyneth Paltrow-ish, New-agey thing for trustafarians, like putting an avocado stone in a shower head to ‘purify’ the water.
I made that up, by the way, but a glance at Georgia’s book The Chakra Project pointed towards a philosophy based on ancient Indian Vedic scriptures.
If these scriptures were good enough for Aldous Huxley ( The Perennial Philosophy), they were good enough for me, along with some more accessible, new age, holistic stuff, and crystal worship to add to the pick ’n’ mix and attract a wider contemporary audience.
The belief in ghosts still flourishes, in spite of Richard Dawkins and modern education. In fact, ghost-hunting is a popular TV genre. In the 1972 frightener The Stone Tape, now shockingly dated, we were first introduced to the concept of a building as a psychic tape recorder that might ‘play back’ traumatic events to those sensitive folk who could divine its messages. Not every soul goes to its appointed place at once. In the past, sin, or an undischarged duty, might hold it earthbound for a season or longer. In our less judgemental age, we say the spirits are ‘stuck’ in a limbo .
So I couldn’t wait to get started on our ghostbusting tour of the cottage. But I didn’t like it when Mary suggested I collect Georgia from a train station forty minutes away, on my own (‘So she can pick up on your vibes without them being diluted by mine’).
I suspected an archetypal conspiracy between females, an assumption that I, the only male present, might be the spanner in the cottage works.
I did not want my quiet life being disturbed by a full exorcism, complete with 360-degree head-turning and French profanities.
Fortunately – and synchronistically – as I set out to collect her from Swindon, a symbol of a spanner appeared on the dashboard, forcing me to perform a U-turn and order her a taxi instead. That was a close shave.
My litmus test of any new visitor to the cottage is whether they appreciate my wild garden. Georgia insisted on a preprandial tour and, unlike another recent visitor, a friend of a friend, who described it as ‘horribly overgrown’, she fell in love with it.
So I was well-disposed when she began to perform a forensically detailed room-by-room spiritual survey; especially once I realised that, unlike a dental treatment, there would be no physical pain involved for myself.
But there was definitely something happening. Deep yawns and gurgling noises in her stomach were clear evidence of a transformation of energies taking place in the healer’s own corporeal realm.
She identified three ghosts of former occupants. None of them malign but all of them ‘stuck’. One had sat huddled at the fireplace for many years. ‘He was a simple fellow; he didn’t think much.’ If we consider the low expectations of agricultural workers of the previous centuries – the lack of stimuli, education or even curiosity – this could only be expected. Another was a boy who had died at the age of sixteen. Then there was an old lady who had lived during Queen Victoria’s reign.
Georgia moved them onwards and upwards. She encouraged the boy to go to a ‘country fair’ and an angel came to take the very old lady.
She also expelled a cohort of nature spirits in the kitchen (where Mary and I argue the most) and I helped by enthusiastically swishing a smoking, sagebrush torch in the direction of the back door, which had been opened to allow their exeunt omnes. How easily I took to the task while all the while she rang a pair of pinging, oriental bells!
It was a singular experience and not something I am prepared to be cynical about. Something happened. Like all true mystical experiences, it would suffer from the banality of being translated into words.
Suffice to say, I can see why estate agents might use the services of Georgia Coleridge to ‘cleanse’ the energies of properties that inexplicably will not sell.