The Orchards Residential Care Home, Wroughton. Where Mrs H received great care.

We were now approaching the end of 2005 and there had been yet more adjustments to my living situation. For various reasons Sue had to sell her house, so she moved into her son, Shaun’s, house, and he went to live with his girlfriend. Also, a friend of Shaun’s needed a favour regarding somewhere to live, so Sue asked me if I would move into the spare room in Shaun’s house while Shaun’s friend moved into Justin’s flat. In the meantime, a couple known to myself and Sue, who lived in the town of Cirencester, approximately 11 miles from Swindon were looking to let out a flat. It was a very strange situation, but the upshot of it was that they did not want any rent; the person going in there simply had to pay their own bills. They had offered it to Sue, having empathized with her situation, but tempted as she was, Sue didn’t want to be 11 miles away from all her family and grand kids etc. I very cheekily suggested that she should drop a few hints to them in my direction; to which Sue replied, “I’ve already thought of that”.

The situation was strange indeed. The house in Cirencester had been converted to accommodate a “granny flat” on the upper level. The lower level was essentially still a house, albeit without an upstairs. The granny flat had been occupied by the lady of the house’s mother, who had died. The elderly lady had lived a long life and the end had been somewhat inevitable, however, the daughter had found it impossible to get over her mother’s death and continued to be affected by it. As a result, the elderly lady’s possessions had never been cleared out; all the furniture and ornaments etc. were exactly how they had been when the flat was occupied. All this didn’t bother me, and thanks to Sue, I was duly offered the flat. Apart from having to pay the bills, the only other condition was that I couldn’t shift any of the old lady’s things around; everything had to remain the same. I moved in on the day before Christmas Eve 2005, and in the early hours of Christmas Eve the flat was duly christened by my first out-of-body experience whilst in occupancy.

At first this was an incredible help to me. For around four months I felt as though I had some stability; and I’d not felt that for years. I got on well with the owners and I even ran a development group in the flat every Thursday night. However, things that seem too good to be true generally are…

I’d met the owners through one of the spiritualist churches that I served and they’d invited me around to do some private readings. It transpired that they had readings roughly every 10 days; it must have cost them a fortune! The reason being that the lady of the house’s psychological well-being was not very stable. She was unable to accept that her mother had died, so in an effort to appease her, the husband was constantly booking mediums in the hope that they would bring the mother through. I eventually realised that the mediums who told them what they wanted to hear were invited into what I called “the inner sanctum”. This meant that they would be periodically invited round for a meal and to carry out readings. If a medium was booked and didn’t tell them what they wanted to hear, they were never invited again. I think that when they let me have the flat they thought they were going to get “messages on tap” from the departed mother. Unfortunately, I don’t work like that.

Apart from in the early days, I have always been a very disciplined medium. I do not go around with spirit jabbering in my ears all day. The only time I’m tuned in is when I’m working. When I get called to time, my mediumship cuts out and stays cut out until the next time I am required to work in a professional capacity.

Everything was going swimmingly well until around early April 2006. I thought I was imagining things at first, but as a few weeks went by, I realised that the lady of the house was no longer speaking to me. I knew that something was just over the horizon, and sure enough, before we were half-way through May I was told that they wanted their flat back. At first it was very amicable, I was told that there was no rush and to take my time. But as the weeks went by it was made obvious to me that I was over-staying my welcome. Eventually, I signed up to the housing association in Cirencester, and in what seemed like no time at all, I had a flat in a converted Baptist Church in a village called Avening, roughly 10 miles away. I was in this flat for almost two years; it was a period that again represented a rather strange time in my life.

I completed my move from Cirencester in August 2006. At first everything was fine, apart from the lack of windows and natural light in the flat, it wasn’t bad, and I was thankful for a roof over my head. But at the tail end of 2006 the nice neighbours upstairs moved out, and a not so nice neighbour moved in. It then became apparent, mainly due to the old church having a grave yard on the grounds, that there was a problem with entities. Sue and John Geis sorted out the entity problem for me; there was one very comical moment when I was in the grave yard trying to act inconspicuously, before placing  a programmed quartz crystal into a strategic position in the ground.

2007 was a mixed year. I wasn’t happy at all living in Avening, but on the plus side I was able to get a job as a support worker, within walking distance of my flat. This supplemented my income, and I was also covering a lot of miles with my spiritual work. My out-of-body experiences had been fairly consistent since the onset in the late 1990s, and Sri Sathya Sai Baba continued to reach out to me across time and space. Another thing that happened was that at some stage it became apparent that Mrs H’s physical health was deteriorating, and The Orchards would soon no longer be able to provide suitable care. I needed to get my mum moved into a nursing home, and after a bit of hassle, I managed to get her a place in a home just off the Oxford Road in Swindon. The home itself wasn’t very nice and it seemed that the owners were only interested in making money, but the staff seemed to be really good, which to me was the main thing.

So, my mum was in her new residence and I was getting busier; I also got fed up with the support worker job in Avening, and I got another support worker job with another company that got me out and about more. 2007 transitioned into 2008 and I would soon be on the move yet again….