I’m an ordinary bloke. So why do I think there might just be something in the ‘unseen world’ that might be ‘t/here’.

When I was five years old, I told my Nanny that we did not know how long my parents would keep us at home so we might as well make preparations to leave. It wasn’t just a stray remark. It was a profound belief that persisted up till my twenties. As a teenager my wealthy parents visited me at boarding school and, without any antecedent conversation about the subject, made me a director of their firm. They promised me the family Rolls Royce, the Hampstead house, the Mayfair-based business – all of it would come to me in time and, in any case, they were getting on in age so my place should be at home, rather than go and work for ‘outsiders’. It was a song sung through the decade I then worked for them. If I voiced any doubt, I was reassured. My mother had half the business and both parents were clear in their promises. Then my mother died and, and my father remarried. I asked my father what happened to all the promises, to be met with the retort “Circumstances have changed!”. My chances of training at the right time for an alternative career were all but blasted; my financial state was of penury. What had made me so sure that this would happen; the outcome of the situation defied all the logic?

My mother in her last days when she was 69 was admitted to hospital with a complaint that was not life-threatening. She took a serious turn for the worse. The doctors thought some foreign foodstuff or medicine had interfered with the medical treatment being given to my mother. They were so sure of this that they were carefully watching any food that was brought in by the family. My father was giving my mother homeopathic remedies that were harmless. It transpired that they were neither homeopathic nor harmless. Her ingestion of these foreign substances was not detected by the hospital authorities till too late. The prescription by the family doctor was later discovered amongst my father’s papers; he had misrepresented to the family’s GP the illness of my mother. My father doubled the dose that was given in the soup he brought my mother, who died. The following weekend my father was holidaying with the mistress he was to marry. The doctors wanted to perform a post mortem. My father went into a tailspin of desperate worry, telling the doctors this went against all his and his wife’s religious principles. It was the first I heard of this. The doctors decided not to go ahead with the post mortem; why so upset a distraught, bereaved and respectable man. So why is this tale told here…

A medium came to our opulent house. She said “Does the name ‘Rickmansworth’ mean anything to anyone present?” The previous day I had visited a friend who lived there, the first time in my life I had heard of the district. It is said that genuine mediums will give a name about a subject unrelated to the main matter about which they wish to talk and will only be known to one person present. Then the medium said: “This is a very odd thing but I am getting a message that there has been a murder in this family!”

I mentioned the latter, well-attested story recently to a friend who is a doctor and he said: “If the medium says this to a thousand families the odds are that she will be right on one occasion.” The doctor is a matter-of-fact person who does not give any credit to an unseen world. Is his answer likely to explain the medium’s words?

The scriptures speak of visions, the Tarsus experience of St Paul being an example. Most of us have heard that account. But who has heard of ‘Akako’, an ordinary grandmother, who recounts the tale of her personal vision in ‘Personal Credos’ on this website?

How many of us over many generations, have stories that do not percolate to a widespread audience? Is there anything in them?

The reader who has not experienced anything like the stories that appear above may not give them the time of day.

But what should I think about the unseen world…?