When I was a student I spent a summer on Long Island, outside New York city, with an old aunt.
To put it mildly, I was not that fond of her. Come to think of it, that’s putting it very mildly.
She had some medical condition that seemed to provide her with an excuse to be as narky as hell, if not downright nasty, much of the time.
What got under my skin was that she had children of her own who were spoiled rotten and could get away with murder, but if I so much as left a towel off the rack in the bathroom, a Nuremberg trial was sure to ensue.
And it didn’t help when I could see her offspring smirking in the background during these tirades, as if it was great entertainment.
Needless to say, I wasn’t that fond of them either.
Anyway, the only time I had a real civil conversation with her was one Sunday night when her own kids had gone out and it was just me and her in front of the telly.
She mellowed unbelievably when talking about home and growing up in rural Donegal.
And she told a great story that evening.
One night years earlier, she had been to the pictures in Letterkenny – we are talking the 1930s here - with a group of other girls but, as usual, had to walk the last couple of miles home on her own. She was, quite literally, walking into the dark.
Usually that was not an issue, but this night she knew she was being followed. She had heard two male voices, and her instincts told her they were not up to any good. She was, she told me, beyond frightened.
And then something very odd happened.
An older man appeared out of nowhere – that’s how she described it – and said to her that he knew where she lived, and to keep walking and not pay any attention to lads following.
He talked to her calmly, asked her about herself, and when she came to the bottom of the lane of her house, he wished her good luck, stating: “This is where we must part.”
Breathlessly relating that evening’s charged events to her mother, the mother focused on the man who appeared from nowhere. Who was he?
This was the nub of her story: “My mother asked me to describe him – what he looked like, what he sounded like and all that – and suddenly she turned pale and started to shake.
“She said it was her father, my grandfather, who had died long before I was born. To the day she died my mother was adamant it was him.”
And my old aunt said she had no doubt that it was too. She had never seen the man before and she never saw him again.
Another story I heard was from a young relative whose mother had died when he was a child.
He was a total sceptic about all this stuff to do with clairvoyance, thinking it full of fraudsters and charlatans, which, to be honest, I’m sure it is.
He told me a very long story, so I’ll give a potted version.
He was only newly married and his wife, for some odd reason, bought him a Christmas present of a visit to a clairvoyant. This happened in a foreign country, not here in Ireland.
On the way to his meeting he had randomly spoken about how they needed to change the car, and how much he liked the new Seat Leon model.
However, with so many other issues crowding his mind, he had totally forgotten about this when he arrived for his session.
So, he was stunned when the clairvoyant said: “Your Mum has just said, have a baby and don’t worry about buying a car, like a Seat Leon.”
That was good, but then the clairvoyant guy really hit the jackpot: “I am getting told off here… I am referring to a baby as Patrick but it’s an odd Irish sound… like Padraig/Pauric.”
My friend had a brother who died at a month old. He was not called Patrick. He was called Padraig. His wife had not even known the baby’s name.
Needless to say, my friend is a changed man these days.
My own missus had an experience in her youth where a female clairvoyant told her she would marry a man who had books everywhere and all she could see was paper.
All I’m saying is that I have a couple of thousand books and I was an editor of a newspaper.
Even odder, this woman told her she would be engaged within a month and married within a year. And so it proved. So, I’m saying nothing about that!
Some famous people believed it was possible to see into the future, including Queen Victoria, the famous psychoanalyst Carl Jung, Abraham Lincoln and, possibly most famous of all, Arthur Conan Doyle, who despite having the hero of his books, Sherlock Holmas, as a super-rationalist, had a long-standing interest in life after death.
Clairvoyance is not scientifically proven but maybe that’s missing the point.
Maybe this whole area of experience is not meant to be a science, but an emotional intelligence that cannot ever be tested using traditional scientific methods because that’s not what it’s about.
Speaking personally, I haven’t a clue.
I suppose what I’m saying now is that I am not as sneering about it as I used to be.