Who Am I? Part Thirty Three

Posted on November 14, 2017 by Author Richard F Holmes

The trouble with the whole 2012 thing, was that the good old media latched onto it and made it into something that it wasn’t. Hence, we had people talking about how the world was going to end; of course, this was never an option. Something that was quite significant for us as a species, was turned into an event that was the butt of jokes, and also gave amateur philosophers the world over the ammunition to expound all manner of theories and opinions. The truth was that the so-called “shift” started long before 21 December 2012, and was exactly that; a very subtle and gradual shift, the result of which meant that our consciousness or energies, whichever term you want to use, became more awakened. The date of 21 December 2012 simply signified the date in the ancient Mayan Calendar when a particular cycle would come to an end. I feel qualified to give this explanation because of what I actually experienced at the time.

A friend of mine once said to me that creation was like an onion. He said it consisted of many layers; and every now and then a layer would peel away and reveal a truth. With this in mind, the first few weeks of 2013 were very interesting for me. There was definitely something different going on, and indeed, the onion of life most certainly did peel away several layers and reveal several truths to me. Of course, I am speaking metaphorically, as we know there is only ONE truth. What I would like to add, however, to my friend’s pearl of wisdom is this; not only does the onion of life reveal truth to you, but as it does so, illusion and delusion, in the form of previous unreal perspectives, dissolves away. So, I had several eureka moments during the first 3-4 weeks of 2013. By the time April came along I had another quite significant experience.

I was booked to do a clairvoyant night at a pub on the outskirts of Cheltenham. I had already got to the stage where I was questioning the relevance of clairvoyant nights from a spiritual perspective. I did not feel that the churning out of mundane messages to people who were, in the main not interested in spirituality, served me any longer. I had already got into the habit of turning down bookings for clairvoyant nights, and I felt that I’d served my apprenticeship and worked my fair share of difficult venues, so I was not too keen on working in a pub. Nonetheless, I accepted the booking. It turned out to be one of those situations where out of great adversity, advantage blossomed!

It was a new initiative by the pub proprietors in an effort to bring in more punters. They had held a couple of these nights already and were going to make it a regular thing. On this particular occasion it was my turn. The event was to take place in the skittle alley upstairs, and on arrival it became apparent that the organisers were clueless. They had no understanding of this kind of thing, and apart from putting the chairs out, did absolutely nothing. There was not even any water put out for me, and I drink gallons of the stuff when I’m working. So, I got my water sorted out and it transpired that I was just left to my own devices. This is unheard of; there is ALWAYS a chairperson; the medium is never just left alone to get on with it. So, there I was; I got up to speak and immediately knew I was in for a rough night. I’d had some tough ones in my time, but this one took the biscuit! Firstly, the energies in this old building were awful (old English pubs do tend to have history), then I noticed that one of the punters had at least one negative entity attached to him. Then to top it off, there was a row of young girls in the audience that disrupted the whole session. The old me would have got angry, but the new me saw it as a challenge.

So, as well as having to work in such negative energies I also had to cope with the teenage girls giggling and nudging each other from start to finish. Everyone I went to had negative body language and did not understand the concept of working with the medium. People did not respond to me; which is absolutely essential for any demonstration of mediumship. So I was standing up in front of these people who were either giggling or just gawping at me. I found it nigh-on impossible to get spirit information, and I had to endure some incredibly long periods of silence; it’s a shame that the silence did not extend to the teenage girls in the audience. This had never happened to me before, and after what seemed like an absolute age, the event came to an end. Incredibly, some of the people came up to me and thanked me for their messages, and some even apologised for the behaviour of the young girls, even though it was nothing to do with them. Some of them complained to the management about the girls’ behaviour and I understand that they were banned from attending future events.

As I drove away from that venue I had a bit of a smile on my face. I was happy that I’d done my best not to be judgemental and just carried on with the task in hand. The experience also confirmed what I already knew, working in pubs no longer served my soul, and neither did clairvoyant demonstrations. From then on I only served two venues that laid on pure clairvoyant nights; the reason for that was because they were two venues where I had always received great support and continuing to serve them was my way of maintaining the connection.

I continued to bumble along; it was very difficult to eek out a living from my spiritual work on a self-employed basis. I also worked as a “helping hand”, for an organisation called Care and Repair. It was a charity that gave support to vulnerable adults in their homes. That was also on a self-employed basis, and even though the money wasn’t brilliant, it added a few pounds of much-needed income to the coffers. As 2013 was nearing its end, something else happened that was nothing short of miraculous.

As a helping hand, I was down to one solitary client; an elderly lady with dementia and poor mobility who lived six miles away. It was Boxing Day, December 26, and I was due to go and see her for a couple of hours. I would do a bit of cleaning and make sure she had a meal. But when I went out to the car it wouldn’t start. I reported in and someone else went out to see the elderly lady. Between Christmas and New Year my trusty mechanic, Tony, got the car going and I thought all was OK. But the day before New Year’s Eve, I set off on a journey to visit a friend who lived near Grimsby (around 170 miles away). I only got eight miles down the road and I heard a knocking sound coming from under the bonnet. I managed to pull over and have a look and found that the water reservoir container was empty. The knocking sound was because the hard plastic container had become so hot, it was banging against the inner framework of the car. It was lucky I’d only travelled eight miles.

I managed to get back home and took the car to Tony again once the New Year was out of the way. He said it would cost a fortune to repair; far more than the car was worth and that I’d be better off getting a new car. That was the worst thing he could have told me. Where would I get the money to buy a new car? I succumbed to the yarn being spun by my mind and went into severe panic mode. There was very little money coming in anyway and now I had no car. Tetbury has a very sparse and expensive bus service, so I would have no way of getting about either. It was a serious case of , “what am I going to do”? Now, I have written extensively about what happened next, so I’m not going to go into all the detail here, because I will still be writing at midnight. You can read the incredible story by clicking on the two links below entitled, Miracles Do Happen.

Miracles Do Happen

Miracles Do Happen 2

But to give you a bit of an idea, I had hardly any work, no car to get to that work, or to look for work, or even to get out and try to claim benefits for an interim period. I realised I was being my own worse enemy and took steps to change my mental attitude. Miraculously, shortly after taking these steps, someone just gave me £1000, right out of the blue. Not only that, they said I didn’t even need to pay it back. It was more miraculous because I never even asked that person for any money! Then shortly after that I got a job from an unexpected source and not long after that, another car!

The next post will be the last in the series, but there will be a summary post after that. We are now at February 2014.

Who Am I? Part Thirteen

Posted on May 9, 2017 by Author Richard F Holmes

The flat at 15 Dixon Street was, in a sense, a God-send for me, but as stated in the previous post, it was also the place where I experienced some extremely dark times.

The flat at 15 Dixon Street was about 30 seconds walk from this church, on the right-hand side. To save you asking… No.. I didn’t attend!

I was approached one day by one of the supervisors at work who told me that his mother was looking for a tenant for a flat that formed part of her house. The rent was unbelievably cheap; only £30 per week, and it would give me my own space again. I went to have a look and decided to take it. Mrs Davis was an elderly lady who wanted the flat to be used. She was not interested in making money out of it. She was an extremely honest lady and declared the rent as income to the Inland Revenue. If she kept the rent low, she would not have to pay tax on it, and she simply wanted to provide a home for somebody who needed it. She had asked her son if he knew of anybody at work who was trustworthy and reliable. It was quite an honour to be the first person who came to mind. The flat needed a lick of paint, which I was more than happy to do. I got on extremely well with Mrs Davis, and the fact that I’d painted her flat firmly cemented my place in her good books. It was only on rare occasions that she would come down to see me, so it was really good for me that I had this space and that I was left alone. I was as regular as clockwork with my rent, so all-in-all it was a great situation for all concerned.

Normally when we spoke it was because I had gone to seek her out. During one of our conversations we somehow got on to the subject of spiritual matters and it turned out that Mrs Davis read Tarot cards, which she did for me on several occasions. Living in Dixon Street gave me a bit of stability; it was less than 10 minutes walk from work and right on top of all the amenities that Swindon offered. However, being a basement flat it was rather dingy and not very well lit. I also felt very isolated within myself for a lot of the time that I lived there. In hindsight, my view now is that I’d had so much going on in my life with my marriage and my relationship with Carol, also my business venture and a few other things, that my deep emotional pain had been by and large suppressed since my teenage, and later, my army years. Now I had my own private living space again, my mates were all married or in serious relationships, so I had more time in isolation than I wanted, and it was during these times that I sunk down into incredible depths of pain. It seemed that I’d been feeling like this for years and that there was simply no end to it.

There was a shop on the corner of Stafford Street, which was one street up from Dixon Street and about two minutes walk from the flat. I would quite often go there and buy their tins of extra strength lager. It was vile stuff; in a plain can with the letters “HSL” on the side. HSL stood for “High Strength Lager”; it was like drinking treacle. A can or two was all it took to knock me into a stupor. I suppose, in my own mind I thought I was numbing the pain, but oft-times I would just sit there crying and wondering if or when the pain would ever stop.

At the end of 1991 one of the girls at work who lived less than two minutes walk from me invited me to a New Year’s Eve party at her house. She was from Sheffield and said that her sister was coming down for New Year. Enter Gillian into my life. She had been in an abusive marriage; married to a man who quite often punched and kicked her. We got on very well and romance blossomed. I had no car when I lived in Dixon Street, so most weekends I would get the coach or train up to Sheffield. I usually worked late shifts, so I could stay until Monday morning and still get back to Swindon in time for work. Gillian had a little boy who was two at the time and there was constant problems with her ex. Before I met Gillian his behaviour had been so appalling that he’d caused Gillian’s dad, Roy, to have a nervous breakdown. Court orders were taken out preventing him from having anything to do with the family, but he ignored them and the police seemed not to care. On one occasion he’d put a brick through the rear window of Roy’s car. Gillian had brothers who could have sorted the problem out, but her parents did not like conflict and were typical of their era in wanting to do things in the “correct” manner. So all-in-all Gillian’s ex caused a great deal of stress for the whole family.

I suggested to Gillian that she should just up and leave Sheffield and come to Swindon. By now her parents were living in Swindon; they had the flat that Gillian’s sister had previously lived in. They had come down because the strain of living in Sheffield had become too much with all the aggro. So Gillian and her little boy moved into the flat with her parents. She was however, very independent and tenacious and she wanted her own place. Eventually she was rehoused by the local council in a tiny matchbox of a flat in the Nythe area. Somehow Gillian managed to fall pregnant; I say somehow, because she was on the pill and we certainly didn’t plan it. I, on the other hand, still lived in a world where alcohol was king, and I kept saying to myself, “I’ll start saving in a couple of months”. Although we didn’t live together, when I stayed over at Gillian’s I found the flat to be really cramped. Also, her little one was a real handful. Gillian must have sensed that my heart wasn’t in it, and out of fear of being left alone with not one, but two small children, she announced to me that she was going to have an abortion. She was four months gone and right on the point of no return as far as having an abortion was concerned.

My feelings were that she was the one who had to go through the pain of giving birth, so if she decided she didn’t want that, then who was I to argue. Ironically Gillian had to go to London for the abortion, to St Anne’s Hospital, which was just a stone’s throw from where I was born in North London. In fact, the hospital was directly opposite Downhills Park, which was one of the parks I used to play in when I was a kid. Our relationship was on and off, and I suppose it’s true to say that we were such good friends that we really shouldn’t have been in a relationship. Like a lot of couples, we got on great, but when you cross that relationship line, things start to become stale and you take each other for granted. I should also mention here that when we were talking about doing the happy families thing, I gave up the flat in Dixon Street and moved back in with my mum. The thinking behind it was that I would be able to save some money. Bad idea, bad move!

What also happened was that Gillian’s parents bought a static caravan in a place called Binbrook, which was near Grimsby. It was a lovely area, and several times whilst we were together, me, Gillian and the little one would go and visit. I loved the bones off Roy, he was a very witty man and he always made me laugh. It was sometimes hard to believe that he was struggling with mental illness. I always held the whole family in such high esteem. They were what I call a real family. They were very close; always phoning each other up, and when they were together they would play board games and stuff. All the things that I wasn’t used to. They accepted me as one of their own and I’ve never forgotten it.

In November 1992 the main sorting office moved from the town centre in Swindon to an industrial area called Dorcan. It was apparently a state of the art all-singing-all-dancing sorting office with machines that did the work once carried out by humans. It didn’t really make any difference; there were no redundancies and the new office was about 10 minutes walk from my mum’s place. However, living with my mum was driving me round the bend. The job was driving me round the bend and so was my life in general. Something had to give; but what? It wasn’t long now before my life would change beyond recognition, but before I reached that stage I had to go through darker times than I could ever imagine.

To be continued…