Showing posts with label Henri Llewelyn Davies. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Henri Llewelyn Davies. Show all posts

Sunday, July 10, 2011

Henri Llewelyn Davies: 'It was I who brought her to "Death" Rowe and Woman's Own'

Psychic astrologer
 Henri Llewelyn Davies
My recent piece on the untimely death of pychic astrologer Henrietta ('Henri') Llewelyn Davies at 56 drew this letter from a former colleague of hers....





Dear Madame,

I hope you don't mind me e-mailing you.

By pure chance (fate?) today, I came across the news of the death of Henri [Llewelyn Davies] on your web-page. I am so shocked and saddened; I didn't know. Please could you tell me how she died?

I knew Henri very well in the early Eighties -- contrary to what your blogger 'Liz' has to say, it was I who took her to Woman's Own.

It seems you knew her well, so you might also know of her time at Look Now magazine. This is where I met her -- she was a good friend of the then-features editor, Adele-Marie Cherreson, and I joined as a junior, working my way through the features dept to become Deputy Editor. We became good friends, and when I found myself working for Bridget 'Death' Rowe as Assistant Editor at Woman's Own (!), I suggested Henri as the new astrologer. Bridget R wasn't easily convinced, but I think she was interested in trying something different, which Henri certainly was, and so it began.

I later went to TVTimes, and, of course, took Henri with me. When I left, Henri stayed on and we kept in touch for a couple of years: she came to my wedding, and I keep an astrological chart and reading she wrote on the birth of my son 18 years ago, scribbled in her unmistakably spidery handwriting! She came out to visit me here in St Albans, but said she felt twitchy leaving the city. Reading her quotes in her obit tonight, I can hear her voice in my head so clearly...Life went on and we probably last spoke about eight years ago, when I began writing a novel on life after death.

Sorry for the unloading, I'm sure you appreciate how I feel. If you could find a moment to tell me what happened to Henri, I would be extremely grateful.

With all best wishes

Doretta Sarris Hogan

Dear Doretta

Thank you for your letter. Henri told me that before she was hired at Woman's Own, 'Death' Rowe took her out to lunch - perhaps to Joe Allen's though I can't be certain. Bridget was perfectly fine and chatty until she rose at the end and suddenly gave Henri a bizarre look as if to remind her who was in charge. The bipolar-ish change in countenance from friendly to hostile was intimidatory. It might not have helped that during lunch, Henri told the editor that her journalistic career would end in her late forties. This proved correct.

Henri died of a brain tumour after treatment for lung cancer. Here is her Telegraph obit.

Best wishes

MA

Sunday, January 27, 2008

Henri Llewelyn Davies: Star of psychic star-gazers


Henrietta Llewleyn Davies died in March 2011.

Rebecca novelist Daphne du Maurier was “some sort of cousin” of hers, her grandfather helped inspire JM Barrie’s Peter Pan while she herself played muse to her mother's famous ad slogan and Kate Winslet has played her great grandmother in Finding Neverland. An interview with the UK-based psychic astrologer Henri Llewelyn Davies.

Henrietta Llewelyn Davies – Henri to her friends - is one of the UK’s top astrologers having written sun sign columns for Cosmo, TV Times, Woman’s Own and other top-selling publications as well as features for The Times and women’s magazines.

She is also a psychic – able to foretell and truth-tell through an extra-sensory perception I do not understand. One of her major private clients is the novelist Jeanette Winterson (Oranges Are Not The Only Fruit) who wrote about her in 2003 (in the Mail, Vogue and Times). She confessed: “My sceptical friends who have had readings with her have all admitted that Henri is special. I am no longer wary of telling people that I use a psychic astrologer. If they protest, I suggest they find out for themselves. They are always impressed.”

Henri is the only Oxford-educated astrologer I know of – and she has a fascinating literary back story. As Winterson tells it: “She [is] related to Daphne Du Maurier on one side of her family - remember Rebecca and Jamaica Inn? On the other side was JM Barrie of Peter Pan fame.

“Her grandfather was one of the 'Lost Boys' adopted by Barrie, and for whom he wrote Peter Pan. But that wasn't all. Henri's great-great grandfather was Queen Victoria's chaplain, and her father was in the Guinness Book Of Records as Britain's most married man. Her mother, meanwhile, was hugely successful in advertising and gave the nation the slogan ‘Cheese Please Louise.”

Henri gives private phone readings from her west London home and there’s a link to her website at the bottom of this interview. She agreed to answer questions by email ...

How do you describe yourself professionally - psychic? astrologer? medium?

I’m a psychic astrologer – I look at people’s horoscopes according to their date, time and place of birth, finding the positions of the planets in a book called an Ephemeris, so this part is “technical”. But astrology was never an exact science and I mix “standard” astrological interpretations of the signs and planets with my own psychic insights and intuition to determine how a person is using their horoscope chart. Even the basic, “stock-in-trade” astrological interpretations are many and varied – there are many ways to use a horoscope – people do have considerable free will, so forget that old chestnut about astrology being deterministic and ignore the idea of Scary Malign Fate.

Mediumship is usually about proving human survival after death. This is not really my line of work, but a lot of very sincere people do this difficult job, often for very poor pay (for example, in Spiritualist churches).

Occasionally my clients say they are desperate for “news” of their dead relatives. One woman wanted to know her dead mother was now okay. I said that I felt she was (note: I‘m not God!) and then I said, “I see a dinner service in my mind’s eye” and described it. (It’s like visualising a picture, say from a magazine, in your head – anyone can do this, by willpower, for a split second anyway. But in my case I don’t programme what I “see”, it just happens, also very briefly. This is not rocket science – it happens to many people and one theory is that everyone has psychic ability somewhere, but they may not have developed it).

The girl’s response to my “vision” of the plates was, “Oh, my mother just lived for her dinner service!” She thought that her mother was sending her a message or perhaps a sign. Personally, I’m not sure what to think about that ....

Have you ever had a sitting with a medium?

I once had a startling one in which he “brought through” a relative of mine who was probably the highest paid British novelist of her day.

I feel it’s best, with mediums, not to feed them information, so I called myself Miss Davies (or ‘Davis’) when I phoned up for a sitting. I was thinking it was better to err on the side of paranoia: I was writing a horoscope column for the highest-circulation magazine of the day - under my own mouthful of a name. Probably the medium wouldn’t know this or read my stuff, but still ... I didn’t do TV at the time – this made sure I was a very anonymous figure when I walked in.

As things turned out, my surname is publicly (albeit not really famously) linked with the sitting below in a way that hadn’t occurred to me at all - so my instinct for secrecy turned out to be right.

This medium, having established a “link” with someone he said wanted to speak to me, said, “I’m going to the West Country in my mind’s eye, right the way down across England.”

(I was partially brought up by my grandmother, who lived in Cornwall. Okay, maybe).

“It’s a distinguished lady, she’s bringing in stacks of paper and pens and a pile of books,” says he.

(Yawn-yawn, thinks I, my gardening-mad, strong-charactered Grannie wrote letters and read books, sure - who didn’t, in those days?)

“This lady was DEFINITELY born between 1900 and 1910,” thunders the medium.

(No - Grannie was born in 1898, possibly he’s just a bit out on dates, it’s very hard for mediums, think I, patronisingly).

“Henry!” he said, “she’s laughing and saying ‘Henry’ and pointing at you. That’s a MAN’s name!” he yelped indignantly.

“Yeah yeah, that’s my nickname, short for Henrietta.” (Not that my grandmother ever dreamt of calling me that).

It got better. He embarked on a series of clues – great fun, and with my mind on my Grannie I couldn’t fathom them immediately. This made the sitting all the more convincing when I finally put the picture together. (By the way, my own "psych" comes from somewhere else, is geared only to helping others, and on certain - often important - occasions myself: I can’t always switch on accurate intuition to order. This to the many Arcati fans who will say like so many members of the public say to psychics, “Well, how come you didn’t KNOW all that?” If I did I wouldn’t be human...)

The medium reported that this Lady said, “When I was on the earth I always saw my home, my house, in my mind’s eye.”

(Weird, comment I thought. Wasn’t she just living in it?)

He then whistled a few bars of a tune – you know how when someone whistles a bit of a song you know, but you can’t place it? “She says it’s the title that matters,” said the medium, adding, “it’s not very ladylike that she’s whistling, is it? She seems SUCH a lady. Do ladies like she seems to be USUALLY whistle?

“And she’s taking me to the West Indies, to Jamaica,” he added. “But she always wanted to come home when she went abroad, she’s saying.”

He picked up that there’s a “Llewelyn” in my name (Okay, Davies – Welsh – not that I’d spelt it for him). But the proof of this pudding was nothing to do with me writing high circulation horoscope columns (which I never did tell him about – they weren’t discussed).

Somewhere round now I twigged who his “communicator” was. He said she was a “loose link” of some sort. “But she IS a relative, a cousin. But now she’s not saying ‘My cousin Henri’; she’s saying, ‘My Cousin Rachel’.”

He went on with many comments – apparently she said that “she” had seen "Hitchcock" and "Larry" on the other side. By this time I wondered if he knew the story behind all this, which was already in the public domain to an extent. The ‘communicator’ had died quite recently and no biographical books had come out yet – a fact he mentioned. But he swore later he knew nothing about the communicator – and even if he had done, subconsciously, there was no reason he should have linked her to me, sitting in front of him.

The novelist Daphne du Maurier - the spirit communicator - was my grandfather’s first cousin and therefore some sort of cousin of mine (I never could fathom that first, second, once removed blah-blah system). I only met Daphne a couple of times, but we corresponded a bit as she was very kind to the young distant relative who wrote aged 14 saying: “I love your book Rebecca.” The whole tone of the sitting was a little bit impersonal, as fitted that particular relationship.

She was born in 1907. The medium’s dates did pan out. And she famously wrote the popular novels Jamaica Inn (the Jamaica reference – she never liked leaving her home turf to travel, either – this is a very well-known fact about her.) Another book of hers was My Cousin Rachel. The unidentified tune the medium whistled turned out, I realised, to be The Road to Mandalay. Daphne’s book Rebecca has an extremely famous first line: “Last night I dreamt I went to Manderley again”. I liked this joke!

Daphne du Maurier set Rebecca in her own “dream house’”, in reality called Menabilly, which she was only ever allowed to rent, not buy. She was forced to leave this house later in life, and never got over the loss. Hence what I initially construed as mystifying waffle from the medium, about her seeing her home in her mind’s eye. (At this point in the sitting the medium also said that she now has a replica of her beloved house in the spirit world! Mediums often say this sort of thing, but with Daphne’s attitude to her home the comment seemed to carry rather more weight).

There was much more that I knew already, or could check was accurate. His view of Daphne was not entirely as I would have seen her (I didn’t know her very well, don’t forget, a lot of what I knew was family hearsay). When I finally told him who he was talking about, he said: “Who that?” (Not his sort of thing, he said, though he did then say he’d seen some Hitchcock films which I knew were based on Daphne’s books.)

Sceptics can knock down almost anything if they want – so often it’s not hundred per cent provable. And yes, there is such a thing as inadvertent mind-reading, whether about dinner plates or Daphne – reading the subconscious, the things that aren’t uppermost in the mind, as well as the conscious. But I liked this sitting a lot, it’s almost watertight, and I believed this medium was genuine. It’s nice for me, because I know I fed him no information (others must believe what they feel is right).

The novelist Jeanette Winterson wrote long pieces about you for Vogue and the Mail - how you acted as her psychic guide. Were you happy with what she wrote? Are you still her guide? She says you were particularly good on property advice …

Jeanette wrote great pieces about me in the Times, Vogue and the Mail. I first met her in 1987. She learnt astrology from me as she wanted to write a novel involving it.

I told her she’d never use the things I was teaching her in her fiction, and indeed she never did. She has consulted me about decisions she has to make in her life many times through the years over the twenty years I’ve known her – like anyone else I speak to she is seeking answers to “unknown quantities”.

Sometimes psych sees round corners that are impossible to gauge with the normal part of one’s brain – it’s useful for seemingly unfathomable conundrums and decisions. I think very high-powered hard-working people like Jeanette, who are incredibly efficient as well as mega-creative, save themselves time and energy by having proven, trustworthy advisers, to clear their heads and cut corners to reaching wise and productive decisions. It doesn’t have to be an astrologer or a psychic - but getting other people who are worth their salt involved is a good system.

Numerous people want property readings – it’s such an expensive, risky business. I was once interviewed on the subject for the property section of the Sunday Times, and mentioned that property is in the end only bricks and mortar – and that perhaps the most important question people should ask is: “How can I live a fulfilling life?” It was interesting how many people who contacted me due to that piece said that the part of it they liked best was the reference to that question.

What do you advise on?

I advise about anything in life - light, heavy and medium-weight. There are numerous readings about relationships, of course. I always tell people I’m not infallible. But I know from experience that if I get really strongly negative feelings about, for example, a job someone’s thinking of taking they will almost certainly rue the day they ignore my advice.

I once insisted a client of mine just must go on a blind date she was reluctant to attend – I was inordinately bossy and pushy about it (not often the case with me, but I felt it was vital she took my advice on this occasion). She and the person she almost skipped meeting have now been happily married for many years. Life-changing stuff like that sometimes happens and I sometimes get to have a hand in it (of course, the client might have suddenly decided to meet the person in question after all, having ceased feeling reluctant, without my advice. But I sure pushed her hard – to her annoyance! - and she’d usually found I was accurate about other things so gave in).

Recently, I’ve had a run of mothers wanting to know about schools and nannies. Some areas are harder for us to fathom without a “sixth sense” than others are – for instance, schools can change unpredictably year on year, who knows what a child’s classmates will be like?, etc. Nannies who interview well may well turn out to be less than saints, etc.

One of the sadder questions, which recurs regularly, is, “Should I have my cat (or dog) put to sleep?” I so hate this question, but I have to answer everything – as positively as possible. Although I may not know it - until I’ve achieved hindsight – the fact is that my sources have been as kind as they can possibly be in any given situation (and obviously there are some traumatic ones). I’ve on occasion disagreed with vets who have felt animals have very little time left to live (with any quality of life, that is – the vets have the best of intentions and so do I) - and I have been proved right (as I have often turned out to be the more accurate one when I’ve disagreed with numerous other professionals employed by my clients – lawyers, architects, plumbers, etc.)

Once I was reading for someone regarding a dog called Dubonnet (not her real name, she was named after another form of alcohol...). The owner was trying to prolong the dog’s life (but not cruelly), and the vet didn’t want to – in this particular instance I felt forced to say, “Let her go”. I absolutely loathed and detested saying it to the poor woman, but I do know (a long story) that if I don’t give out what I strongly feel, then worse trouble really does follow (and I can’t judge in advance what sort of trouble that will be – I have to blindly trust my sources and I have to say they have never let me down – provided I listen and say what I’m told to say. It is an extraordinarily clever system when I’m channelling like that - for which, obviously, I can take no personal credit).

I often don’t know what the words I say are actually going to mean – often, words can be interpreted different ways – so I often literally repeat words I hear in my head when doing psychic work. A lightweight story about this involves a girl who had been dumped by a boyfriend – I told her that a new romance was on the way. “He’s miles better,” I said airily, ‘and he’s just around the corner.’ The girl got back to me a while later, giggling – she had indeed found a nice new boy - and said (referring to my comment): “His name’s Miles and he lives just around the corner!” Ha ha.

I don’t get bad news to impart usually (what’s the point of upsetting people in advance of anything they can’t stop happening) – one reason I DO get bad news is if it’s a warning and the person can do something about damage limitation.

And the conclusion to the Dubonnet story about the dog? She actually died naturally and somewhat unexpectedly in her sleep shortly after I’d so reluctantly advised the owner to let her go - the “bad news” had in fact served as a kind of preparation for the inevitable loss to come.

Jeanette says she was fearful of relinquishing her sense of independence. Is this a common reaction to your influence?

Nobody actually says that to me when they have a reading – because they’ve made up their minds they need help with some aspect(s) of their lives. They listen to what I have to say - then, in the end, they have to make their own decisions, of course. The big bogey question about astrology is about free will as versus predestination. In fact no astrologer is going to tell you that you have no free will: this is repetition but can’t be said too often. I think people have a lot more free will than they often believe.

Unlike many psychics, who pluck "information" and predictions for the future out of the blue (which is often very hit and miss) I narrow the field and work a lot on people’s questions about what they should do right now. I have found, over the quarter century I’ve been doing this work, that this gives far more accurate results for me.

I do also predict the farther future at times. I am a lot more “directive” than many non-psychic counsellors; I tend to tell people exactly what I think they should do (I think life’s short, and my approach can save time). There are often lots of possible answers to dilemmas and there are many potentially reasonable life directions – my job is to try and choose the one that’s best for my client’s happiness and personal growth. My input has to ring true to them at gut level for them to act on it – sometimes it may not seem logical, though!

What kinds of people consult you - any other names? Major names in journalism, publishing, business etc consult you, don’t they?

I can’t name names – it’s confidential. People talk to me as a respite from the outside world. When I was looking for celebrities to interview monthly for a series of articles I was doing for the Times, based on celebrities’ horoscope charts, I had no trouble finding Virgo and Libra names to interview, for the September and October issues, but I came unstuck the next month - on Scorpio.

The Times approached 40 celebs with Scorpio birthdays and they were all suspicious of this new form of interview, using astrology – even though I was only going to be nice and non-invasive with them (I’d never want to be anything but kind in my personal readings, published or not – life’s hard enough already). A couple of Scorpio stars who had already enjoyed having personal, private readings from me, on the telephone, also backed off in horror when I put the idea of a newspaper interview to them. Still, that’s Scorpios, they don’t like having their psyches dug into publicly. Understandable, really. People like to be private with me, usually.

Many professions come to me and I’m equally interested in everyone’s needs. The well-known people I do readings for are mostly writers or actors, artists/designers or creative people who, though now very high-powered business-wise, started off arty in some way. That goes with the territory. In my time I have myself been into writing/acting/arty things – so it’s also a case of “like attracts like”. Of course big companies also use astrologers – but I’m not one of them and stocks and shares are not my forte, though I’ll talk about them occasionally with clients if they really want.

You’re not just a psychic but also an astrologer - you’ve written sun sign columns for Cosmopolitan, Woman’s Own, TV Times, and others - why aren’t you doing these columns any more? Would you do them again?

I was once interviewed on TV together with an astro-physicist. I was a horoscope columnist and the TV company hoped we’d have an argument - but neither of us really wanted to. I said that everyone knows that horoscope columns are far more general than personal astrology, which is more specific and thus right on the nail more often. But with horoscope columns I know for myself that you can often get it right – I did the job for a very long time. If writing them, you must always find the ray of hope, even if there’s a lot of challenging planetary stuff around – you seriously can stop people slitting their wrists – I can’t stress this aspect enough, I was always concentrating on it, though sometimes my columns were also really fun. Afterwards the astro-physicist came up to me quite excitedly and said, “Do you know, I’ve never thought about the therapeutic qualities of astrology before? That’s very interesting, that it’s therapeutic.”

Hats off to him for admitting he’d overlooked something that to so many of us is so obvious. I have noticed that the greatest physicists (so far as I know anything about them – not my field) sometimes are almost like high-level mystics – very impressive in their wisdom and humility, admitting the great gulfs in their knowledge.

Horoscope columns are curiously democratic, in that many people from all walks of life read them, ranging from, say, some academics, to anyone else at all, and I like that. I wrote numerous horoscope columns for many years. I have concentrated on personal readings more recently, but I will now be very happy to write columns again,

It’s fashionable in Western intellectual circles to adopt an aggressive secularism - anything to do with the paranormal or mystical is dismissed as “mumbo jumbo” - what’s your view on this?

Mumbo jumbo (ie rubbish masquerading as truth) is found here and there in almost all fields – politics, the written word, my own field et al. Then again, much depends on all our personal prejudices as to what is mumb or jumb.

The traditional astrologer answer to people who dislike our field is to quote Isaac Newton who was very into astrology. When sneered at by a detractor he replied smoothly, “Sir, I have studied it. You have not.” I think that’s reasonable – quite slick actually, Isaac. Astrology is a subtle art, it’s not just about fixed interpretations of sun signs - the detractors would have to work hard to try and substantiate their claims and they rarely seem to. I think they perfectly reasonably prefer putting their energies into other things. Chacun à son goût, and why not?

Richard Dawkins, who was scathing about astrology on TV this year, admittedly may have been hamstrung by the customary hidebound lack of originality in TV companies’ ideas when they make programmes that are sceptical about astrology and psychic matters. They tend to come up with the same tired shallow arguments again and again. They are seemingly maddened that people put faith in horoscope columns (why not? So long as nothing negative comes out of them – it’s in the writing, that.)

One of their standard lines of attack seems to be to quote the so-called Barnum Effect ie when you circulate a list of general traits of human beings, supposedly applicable to one star sign but which in fact are very general and apply to just about everybody. You then hand this list out to Capricorns, Virgos, all the different signs if you like, and say, “This is your character as a (fill in the sign). Is it accurate? Is astrology therefore accurate, since it’s talking about (fill in star sign).” Of course, they all say yes, it’s accurate, even though it was written by one person for a sign that’s probably different from their own.

SO? Therefore, say the sceptics, all sun sign astrology is bunk. Oh, really? No, actually, that particular bogus mocked-up bit of paper just happens to apply to everyone – it wasn’t the whole spectrum of sun sign astrology those people (fill in star sign) were looking at. Dawkins used this example to debunk astrology on a TV programme this year – bit facile, that, sadly reductionist.

I don’t mind discussing astrology and psychic matters with sceptics. In my experience, it’s always been good-humoured, we exchange giggles with/at each other and anyway they’re often chuffed to hear me say anything accurate/encouraging about THEM – after all, everybody’s always wanting interesting knowledge about themselves.

How did you discover your gift? How did friends and family react? Then you went to Oxford Uni - that must be a unique selling point. Most psychics I know have not developed their intellects …

I met someone who was very psychic himself and had a knack of shoving people up a notch in that area. He gave me a certain amount of instruction verbally, but mostly I just started to absorb his gifts by some mysterious process of osmosis.

I had some fairly dramatic and definitely convincing psychic experiences around then, but maybe this is not the time or the place to go into that. Everyone is always most interested in their own psychic experiences, anyway – rightly. Most people can only really believe in it by experiencing some element of it for themselves.

Most of my friends were sanguine that I became an astrologer and psychic (including people I’d been to university with, who you seem to be implicitly defining as “intellectuals”). Some were fellow enthusiastic learners, almost all those who were sceptical were polite about it – all this says more about the quality of my friends than about anything I got right. With some friends I don’t talk about it much - I’d never shove it down anyone’s throat if they don’t want to know.

My family, most of whom died untimely anyway, and none of whom were psychics, would probably have preferred me to have the stability of a nine to five job – almost all relatives would, wouldn’t they? My grandmother’s reservations about my becoming an astrologer were purely financially based – although she also found it a bit freaky as a subject. However, when, in my youth, I tried a “real” job - working on the editorial side of publishing - I soon got sacked for being visibly so bored! And the bosses probably knew I was doing astrology under the desk, rather than the filing. Things have worked out fine since.

I don’t know if I did ever develop my intellect, or if other psychics do usually - the dictionary definition of intellect is actually "intelligence" and intelligence is hard to quantify.

I have a BA from Oxford in English Language and Literature (if you wanted to be an MA all you had to do was to wait a few years and then cough up £10 – I didn’t bother). I came away with a very middle, mediocre 2nd (Oxford didn’t divide them into 2.1s and 2.2s in those days) - not good really, as you should either get a first or a third. I did about a quarter of the academic work I was supposed to in my three years there (too busy reading tarot cards, perhaps!).

I went into most three-hour Finals exam half an hour late, wrote everything I could think up, and left half an hour early. English is a bit of a non-subject anyway, and to an extent was easy pickings for creative wafflers, but I suppose there’s also an argument to say that I used my strongly developed intuition to drag up just enough of the “right” stuff (well, I hadn’t READ that much) to satisfy the examiners.

The only exam for which I got an alpha (top mark) at Oxford was the only one you couldn’t swot up for - most people didn’t like that one much. You had to analyse a passage of prose or poetry, and say how and why it worked (or not). Again I think I was probably “helped” from Above – by my psychic ability - admittedly aided by a huge passion for poetry (though often not the poetry we were supposed to read at college) which also probably helped me to write about poetry well.

Many successful novelists say that their best work often seems to “come from somewhere else” or to “write itself”. But, as I understand it, you have to work damn hard at the craft of the novel if you want to get it right – these times of inspiration are maybe like a reward. I worked hard at poetry in my own fashion (though it didn’t seem like work - it was my lifeline in my traumatic adolescence). Maybe this says you can be psychic, or a “channel”, for really inspirational and/or respected thoughts, but you have to in some way work hard for it.

Tell me something about your family and their connection with JM Barrie.

My maternal grandfather was one of the five boys adopted by JM Barrie after their parents died young and tragically – he wrote Peter Pan entirely for them and to a large extent lived for them and through them.

The story of JM Barrie is told (with only a few glaring inaccuracies) in the film Finding Neverland – it was shown on BBC2 on New Year’s Day. I don’t know why the film company had only four, not five boys, in their version of the story (perhaps they couldn’t afford to pay a baby in a pram) and it was a bit disconcerting seeing Kate Winslet starring as my great grandmother. There is a reproduction of a portrait of the said great-granny in the film – I own the original.

I am called Llewelyn Davies like the above grandfather and my mother, because my father, a Fleet Street journalist (chiefly distinguished for once being editor of Picture Post - a magazine much lauded and ground-breaking in the 1940s-50s) - was married seven times (he was involved with my mother between the fourth and fifth wives).

My mother was a bluestocking turned advertising copywriter. She invented the popular slogan “Cheese please Louise” - for which I take credit as she got the idea from me aged five stomping annoyingly round the house screeching “What do you want for tea, Pam? Jam!”

Why do people consult you? Must they be in crisis to activate your gift?

People don’t need to be in crisis for me to psych things out for them, but it has to be something they genuinely want or need to know. Joke “test” questions like, “Well, what’s my girlfriend’s name, then?” often don’t get answers - it’s a waste of energy and I usually simply go blank. Party-trick psychics are fun, and have their place, but I’m not one of them. I’m there to help with what people DON’T know about and need for their development (and, though it may sound pompous, need ultimately for the good of the world) and I’m on the “spiritual” side of psychism, rather than the fun side.

Occasionally extreme sceptics seem to pull “useless” information they already knew out of me (are they “ready” on some level or something?). Such as the plumber who was working in my flat and who scoffed when he heard about my work : “I don’t believe in all that rubbish”. A voice in my head said, “Tell him he’s an Aries!” “How d’you know THAT? “ he spat, outraged. “I didn’t know myself,’ I said. “Somebody up there just told me it”.

And no I don’t guess sun signs normally (that’s what people ALWAYS ask at parties) – it’s a strange kink of the trade that professionals are less good at that than some amateurs. Perhaps because we get muddled up by all the other aspects of the chart we can perceive by the time we know a lot about the whole complex system. Everyone has far more to their horoscope chart than just their sun sign – moon sign, rising sign and much much more. Once you go into it deeply you tend to start finding you’re guessing sun signs wrong.

What are you reading right now?

Books, Baguettes and Bedbugs – the Left Bank World of Shakespeare and Company. By Jeremy Mercer. It’s about a famously eccentric, and rather wonderful, long-established English bookshop in Paris that I visited recently.

Complete this sentence. A happy life is...

A happy life is open to inspiration and love.

Thank you very much, Madame, for allowing me to appear on such an interesting, original and eclectic site. (PS Please keep saving whales and everything else that’s wonderful!)

Henri, thank you for your time, and a Happy 2008!