Downing Tools

As I write, I am sitting on my boyfriend's parent's sofa. They have one of those suites where you can electronically recline, and believe me, I am making the most of it. I am feeling fatigued again. In fact, I have been feeling like that a lot lately. I was in town with friends a few mornings ago and ended up just sitting on a bench because I felt so weak. It passed after an hour, but for that time, my concentration was wrecked and I sank into my seat, resisting the effort to speak to my mates.

So how's the next week looking? I started stitching a new patchwork wall hanging this evening, but feeling so tired again, I decided to stop and relax here in front of trashy-television instead. It's got to be done by Wednesday and I also need to print and iron twenty-five t-shirts for The School of Doom. I am going there with my agent so that we can start setting up the exhibition for the next day. That will mean preparing the exhibition space, mounting and hanging the kids work.

I am in a different school on Monday. I have got to have my dress pattern altered by then and new costumes prepared for them to fit and decorate. Therefore, I don't have too much time to get this stuff done, aside from on my weekend. All of my materials were finally ordered at The School of Doom after about two months of my requesting them and them not being ordered. Can you believe that when they finally arrived on Monday, some wise member of the school believed the order to be a mistake and sent the whole lot back? From everything I have experienced there already, I am not surprised, but was still frustrated. This means that I need to now go out and buy it all myself tomorrow. I should have done that from the beginning. It's just another thing to do and all of this stress probably has something to do with the way I am feeling physically.

Yesterday's cards brought about the 5 of Swords and the 8 of Pentacles. The batlike figure in the first card highlights how I felt about the materials being sent back and not having them for my last set of lessons with the boys. I felt crushed and had ten minutes to come up with an alternative, but I don't think that this is what the cards are talking about. By the end of the afternoon, I found out that another job I was meant to do in a weeks time had been cancelled. Apparently, the school had pulled out and all of the practitioners have lost their work. My agent said that there could be some kind of clause in the contract where we can still be paid half of the fee, since the school left it so late in the day before withdrawing. This duo is about the defeat of my skills and practice.

I really needed some kind of diversion last night. I didn't see my boyfriend yesterday, and instead, took the bus over to see my friend, Kate. On a whim, she got us tickets to go and spend an evening with some paranormal investigators in a village hall. We took a taxi there and joined a circle of about thirty people. To be honest, I think we expected a bit more than we received. The two women who ran it were not particularly focused and brought little to the table, despite their thirty years of joint experience. We were given dowsing rods and other jiggery-pokery to use, without any real understanding of what we were supposed to be doing with it all. During the four hours there, Kate and I joined some others in a back room with the lights out, placing our finger over a glass on the table. I know that I wasn't pushing down on it at all and neither was she. Another couple were with us, who we got along with well, and they said that they were not pushing the glass either. The four of us were a little unsure whether the fifth bloke with us was administering any pressure, because after a while, the glass was soon moving around the table. It was a bit much for some of the women in there, who left. However, even though the glass seemed to be gunning for me at one point, I still felt a little luke-warm about the whole thing.

After a short break, Kate asked if I had felt anything during the evening and I admitted that I hadn't. She said that she had when we were sitting in a corner of the hall, and we also looked at a photo someone had taken, which quite clearly showed some kind of ghostly face in the background. However, it wasn't until the very last exercise that my perception was altered slightly. It was suggested that we sit around a table in the dark and have a seance. The two women running it had something called a Ghost Box, which picks up white noise. I hadn't seen anything like this before. Apparently, it is a tool, like a radio, to help spirit communicate verbally. We sat there for a few minutes and all we could hear was the whirling and gurgling of the machine. The woman running the seance asked if the spirits had a message for anyone in the group. More gurgling and buzzing continued, but then, as clear as you like, my name was spoken through the box. Kate and I just looked at each other and the whole group sat still in shock. The main woman asked 'Is your name Steve or do you have a message for Steve?'. A few seconds ensued, but as clear as before, the voice quickly replied 'For Steven'. My stomach dropped.

The problem with what continued was that so many people from the group began chatting. I tried to communicate and ask who the voice belonged to, but Kate and I, who had some kind of amplifier plugged into our ears, couldn't hear over the group's chitter chatter and questioning. Whoever the voice belonged to must have become frustrated too, because I never received my message. Different voices came through on the machine, uttering words which were surprisingly and eerily decipherable, but the mediums, with their thirty joint years of experience, couldn't manage to get anything from them or control the group. Along with the buffet, it kind of made the evening for me, all the same.

When we woke this morning, we took our coffees out onto Kate's patio and went for a walk in the village when we were dressed. It was extremely sunny, and feeling exhausted again, I agreed to go and sit in the pub garden with a soft drink. As I have mentioned before, Kate is very good company. We eventually wandered back to her parent's house, where my own parents dropped in for tea and a chat in the garden before driving me home. The name Happy Jack had come through on the box last night, so we chose to also pop into the betting shop and put a fiver on any horse with Jack in it's name. Our horse didn't even place.

Due to being tired, I have chosen to down tools for tonight. I am plonked in front of the television, wishing I felt energetic enough to get up and not be held hostage by both my own fatigue and the dreadful Brigit Jones bile on the tv screen.

Illustrations from The Vampire Tarot by Nathalie Hertz