Hannah Borno

Feeling a bit low and a bit anxious (could be due to mortgage trouble back home in London – but probably more to do with the five macchiatos), at 4.45 I walk past a psychic booth. The sign on the door says ‘Open’. It’s a sign.

Now generally, I’m of the opinion that going to see a psychic is like going to see a therapist. You pay them a few quid and you get to talk about yourself for an hour. If you’re lucky you glean a few insights and enjoy the chat, and if you’re not, you come away feeling faintly unsatisfied, but with no real harm done. If you’re super lucky the psychic tells you something you didn’t know, and gives you a lovely plausible message from your Grandmother.

So when I step into Marie’s booth I’m expecting a nice, cosy chat at the very least. Not so. Marie tells me I only have one year to realise my creative potential otherwise it will be too late! She says I need to live near water to be happy and then she looks piercingly into my eyes and tells me I’m an old soul with negative karma from a previous life which is now giving me bad luck! Marie suggests that I’ll never be successful until she takes me through a cleansing process to change my luck. Afterwards, I need another macchiato to ponder her psychic observations and by this time I’m feeling so edgy that there’s nothing else to do but go back and confront her.

‘I was just about to shut up shop’ she says. ‘It’s meant to be that you came back to find me.’

I ask her if she really believes that I have bad luck, or if it’s just a sales tactic to sell me the cleansing?

‘Come back when you’re ready,’ she says, smiling beatifically so I apologise and ask her to tell me more about the cleansing. One should never antagonise a woman who holds your future in her well- manicured hands.

She stares at me with those piercing blue eyes again and says emphatically ‘you have bad’ pause ‘luck. You work hard and you never get anywhere because of your bad’ pause ‘luck. But I can go into a trance and find out where and when you got the bad luck, and teach you how to get rid of it, whether by meditation or by crystals’!

I ask how much this process will cost. ‘300 dollars’ she tells me.

I make my excuses and leave feeling more than faintly dissatisfied, in fact I’m downright rattled.

Later that night I find an awful lot of asparagus risotto comforting in gluten free heaven.