The future's not so clair...

Do you ever read those thrashy mags such as “Take a Break”, “Chat”, “Love It!”, “Full House!”, “Real People”, “Pick Me Up” and the like? If not, presumably because you feel they aren’t sufficiently high-brow for your sensibilities, you are missing out. They are great, they really are. We’ve got a stash of them here on holidays with us.

Now I’m not talking about the celebrity ones – wouldn’t be interested in those at all – but the ones that feature allegedly true scandal stories from “real people”. Mothers having it off with their daughter’s new hubby (usually called Darren) on the wedding day, then the pair of them - the mother and Darren - shacking up together before the confetti has blown out of the churchyard. It’s always a church wedding, and it’s usually financed by a 20-grand advance from The Loan Company.

Then there are full-page adverts flogging “collections” from the Franklin Mint or some such. Tacky plates or trinkets and “gold plated” rings with big farthings on them, which presumably double as knuckle dusters if someone spills your pint down the pub. Another one, from the Diamond Discount Centre, features an awful-looking ring containing “24 diamonds” for 99 quid. I don’t do jewellery myself, but that sounds a bit cheap for 24 diamonds. Real ones, I mean.

Then there are stories about “psychic dating”, where two charlatans – I mean clairvoyants – who happen to be “twin flames” (lovers in a “past life”, apparently. They’ve been together a year in this one) tell hopefuls who’ve handed over the requisite readies that they are going to meet their “soulmate” very soon, and that Aunt Aggie has confirmed the validity of this prediction from beyond the grave. One woman at a “psychic speed-dating” session, Rachel Spencer, had “tried everything to bag Mr Right, with no luck”. “I’ve been single for six years”, she reveals, then goes on to tell us she avoids even speaking to anyone who is “a Gemini or a Sagittarius”. Is it any wonder, love?

This is very tenuous, I know, for a Gombeen Nation blog (so you must think I’m getting very desperate) but there is an Irish connection here. Real People has a “Mad World” column, consisting of “mapcap stories from around the globe”. One of the stories is about a clairvoyant by the name of Una Power, who took 98FM to an employment tribunal for axing her psychic phone-in show. “I was stunned”, she told the court, “this came completely out of the blue”.

So much for looking into the future, eh?

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