Clairvoyance: Natural gift or a clever guess?

A LEAKY bathroom, problems with my heels, a fancy new job in London and four godchildren – by the time I left Katie Lancashire's Yaxley home my head was swimming with both the good and bad that my future holds.

If I'd imagined that a session with a clairvoyant would be a series of vague proclamations about tall dark handsome men, I couldn't have been more wrong.

From the moment Katie (29) turned over the tarot cards she uses as tools to help interpret the messages and images she sees, she was firing off predictions and information – it was an extensive, almost dazzlingly packed reading, using the cards, a crystal ball and my palms.

There was some fairly exciting stuff in there – two children for me, good career progression including work on a monthly national magazine and even TV presenting, as well as some not so good – I'm going to lose my phone and my purse and my other half is going to wind up in hospital with a suspected broken ankle.

But the thing everyone wants to know when you say you've been to see a clairvoyant is not what they've predicted about your future but what they told you about your present, what nuggets about yourself they can reveal using their talents.

I'm naturally quite cynical but even I was quite impressed by some of the things Katie was able to tell me.

She knew without asking I had a brother, and guessed that he was in the building trade. He's an electrical engineer who at the time was working on installations so I think that's fairly close.

Throughout the readings various names came up.

Some Katie told me to write down as they would be important to me later, and some already meant something to me.

For example, out of nowhere, she asked me who Mark is –he is my boyfriend of five years.

I've written about him in the paper before so the cynics out there have pointed out that a not particularly extensive Google search could have given Katie this piece of information.

But there were a couple of other pieces of information she got which made me quite inclined to believe that her abilities are natural and not gleaned from the World Wide Web.

The one that really got me happened as I was leaving.

Katie is a medium and is sometimes visited by spirits, some of which signal their arrival by switching on a touch-operated lamp across the other side of the room to where Katie does her readings.

As I was preparing to go, this came on and Katie said there was a woman in the room.

She gave me two names, Eileen or Aileen.

Eileen was the name of my paternal grandmother who I have never met as she died many years ago.

This most definitely got my attention, and the information and messages she gave me from my grandmother really rang true, and could not have been found on the internet.

She also accurately described my personality by looking at my hands – she said I was independent and like to be in control, which I think are both very true.

This is not to say that everything Katie said felt spot-on. The way she described my dad’s personality wasn’t quite right and she talked about how in my new job I would need or want to move to London – something which I would be very reluctant to do.

My mum asked me afterwards if I’d found the notion of being visited by my late grandmother scary, but in fact I was quite comforted and that’s how I would describe the whole experience.

Although I would say I’m happy at work and at home, like so many of us at this time of year, I was suffering from the winter blues and wallowing in self pity a bit as the summer and any excitement seems a long way off.

Just to know there’s a chance there could be some pretty interesting stuff on the horizon was a huge boost.

Katie is a very confident woman whose absolute belief in her abilities is almost infectious.

She has known she is clairvoyant from a very early age.

“Since the age of five I knew I could tell people about themselves and see things. It’s a gift that’s gone through my family. My mum does readings,” she said.

She gave her first reading when she was just seven and has now been doing them full time for seven years.

Katie describes the information she receives as being like a film playing in her head on fast forward without sound.

“It is a feeling as well. It’s far more than intuition. It’s just knowing. It’s like someone asking you a really abstract question and you know the answer but you don’t know how you know,” she said.

Although I will confess to being quite impressed by the reading Katie gave me, there are of course people who refuse to believe in her abilities.

All Katie asks for is a bit of respect.

“You get people saying ‘what a load of rubbish’. Everybody’s entitled to their own opinion. I’ll never ever force my job on them but equally I won’t stand for people berating it and slating it unnecessarily,” she said.

“What frustrates me is people who come for readings and whatever you say to them, they say ‘no’ and they won’t be open to what I’m telling them.

“To have a reading you have at least got to be open to what you’re going to hear.”

On the flip side of this are people who treat what is Katie’s job as a joke and a bit of a novelty, hoping she can tell them whether or not they’re going to meet the man of their dreams or win the lottery, and Katie is wary of her gift being taken lightly.

“People want a free reading, they’ll see it as a party piece,” she said.

“I won’t do readings under duress and under pressure. “People come to see me when they’ve got big problems. We can all have fun with our jobs but I don’t want mine to be made a mockery of.”

- For more information on Katie, visit her website www.katielancashire.co.uk or ring 01733 246426.