At the age of 28 the psychic tendancies started to manifest

Second new pub quiz of the week, and things start to get scary. It's The Swan, on Bishopthope Rd. Not far from where I used to live, but not a place I'd ever been to before. Actually a pretty decent pub - TT's Landlord on tap, always a bonus for me.

I correctly identified Kim Wilde's "Kids in America", and Billy Idol's "Hot in the city". Due to peer pressure ended up changing the Idol to Ocean (Big wrong!) - big darn! And also got some none-music ones sorted. But tricky questions: First names of the three original members of Bananarama. We got Siobhan and Keren pretty quickly, but girl no 3 proved elusive. As the quiz end neared us, drastic measures were needed. And it's hard to thing of something more desperate than "Let Rich do automatic writing - that's our best hope". So I try the automatic writing. Close my eyes, let the pen move over the paper - some squigglies come out.

Our first guess is that I'd written Sophie. But then the initial S inspired a guess of Sara from elsewhere in the team. and then when the squiggles were relooked at, it was actually quite easy to see that that was what I had written... Maybe I knew the answer subconsciously?...

But then it got weirder still. On our team was a girl I'd never met before. To try and validate my automatic writing skills, I tried to guess the name of her sister (could have been mother, but I think we changed to sister). A name sprang into my head almost straight away (I had to lightly touch her shoulder to get this to work - all the best psychotics need some small physical connection). The name I thought of was 'Fiona'. Now, because this name had hit me fairly hard, I tried quite consciously to not write it down. And conscious efforts mess up the automatic writing. And I ended with a load of illegible scribbles.

The correct name I should have written was... Fiona. Somehow I had pulled a rabbit from a hat. Sadly, I had (and still have) no way to probe I'd selected that name, other than my apparent look of fear. I have no way of knowing where it came from. It could just be coincidence. But it was more than a bit odd...