Pinner Daze
I grew up in a suburban town on the outskirts of London in a mock Tudor semi-detached house with a hard-working mum who held down four different jobs and a dad who honed his craft as a sign writer for his whole working life (bar a brief stint as a milkman before I was born). Nothing out of the ordinary there. A classic 80s/90s suburban childhood full of school-packed lunches, chats on house phones and the odd camping holiday thrown into the mix. Yet Mum was always up for the extraordinary, often desperately seeking it out.
On Pinner High Street above a small shop that sold crystals and wind chimes there was a therapy room. I just had to call my mum to reacquaint myself with the name of this shop as the decades have made the memory fade to sepia tones and she tells me, with absolute clarity, the shop was called Dreamcatcher, which is no surprise to any of us. You could get many treatments, from reiki to energy healing and past life regression, all while, below the treatment-room window, the good people of Pinner bought their weekly shop in the giant Tesco over the road.
My first experience of Pinner’s very own spiritual portal was around the age of sixteen. Mum had been before and said I might have fun booking in for a past life regression session. After making my way past an Everest-sized pile of crystals in Dreamcatcher’s shop entrance, I ducked under the stalactites of wind chimes hanging from every inch of the ceiling, to make my way upstairs to the treatment room. A middle-aged lady with coiled tangerine hair asked me to lie down and close my eyes. I can’t recall exactly what happened next but I imagine that, while I had my eyes closed, she waved her hands around, over and above my body, never touching me but giving off that buzz of energy that is often experienced with reiki.
Now hold on to your hats as I tell you the part you’ll either be fascinated by or laugh your head off at. The first past life she recalled for me was from a period in the early 1900s where I had a twin brother who was my partner in crime as a trapeze artist. We would swing together in synchronised beauty high above a cheering crowd. On one occasion I lost my grip and my dear twin’s hands slipped through my fingers like a wet bar of soap and he fell to his death. Tragic, I know, and maybe far-fetched but I loved the process nonetheless and, even if I came away not 100 per cent wedded to the story itself, it massively piqued my interest in past life regression. It could also be tenuously linked to my omnipresent need to make sure everyone in my life is OK and safe at all times, who knows?
I more recently spoke to the incredible Rhonda Byrne, author of The Secret, and she talked passionately about how we never die as our ‘energy’ (insert here ‘spirit/soul’ or whatever you are comfortable with) can never die. You don’t have to believe in reincarnation to be on board with this one as none of us truly know where our energy goes once the physical part of us dies. Could it embody another physical form or just weave into our complex universe in inexplicable ways?
Mum also used to open my eyes to alternative possibilities on our evening walks. Eager to break the mundanity of suburban routine, instead of settling for Coronation Street after our Linda McCartney sausages, we would stomp around the mean blocks of Ruislip at dusk. These chats would veer off into the deep expanses of life’s unimaginable possibilities as Mum reached for the stars above the mock Tudor maze.
On one occasion Mum stopped in her tracks and looked around. I mimicked her stance and looked for what had caught Mum’s eye. ‘Do you feel it?’ she whispered. I stopped and looked into the distance with a little more focus and … I did, I did feel a shift in something. This is where things get a little weird again but, you know me, I love weird. The air seemed thicker, time seemed to have stopped. We both marvelled at this secluded moment, just me, Mum and this strange shift in energy we were both feeling and possibly even seeing. Everything looked a little more hazy than normal, a little purple even.
Team cynical will of course say there must have been a nearby bonfire or a heavy mist en route but it didn’t feel like that. Team cynical, I love you just as much as those who are nodding their heads right now having experienced something similar. We can of course continue to look exclusively for the scientific explanation for everything, but maybe there is a little room for intrigue, magic and the totally weird that is left unexplained too. We felt something inexplicable on our nightly walk that summer’s evening. An invisible movement and an all-encompassing shift of sorts. The delicious juxtaposition of the extraordinary in the setting of the totally ordinary.
Originally published in full on stylist.co.uk. Re-published with permission. Part 3.
- Fearne Cotton, author of Bigger Than Us