the angelic presence

By Amanda Ducker, Vogue

And then I met Alan Pilkington. A colleague had been collared by Alan at some social function. "You have a sister," he said. "She’s had a terrible accident. She can’t speak. She will be fine in a year’s time, and she’ll change profession." This woman’s sister had been involved in a freakish car accident - an industrial lawnmower or somesuch piece of equipment and fallen from a lorry, through the car roof, and the blade had pierced her brain, leaving her in a coma. A year later, she recovered and eventually changed profession.

The prospect of meeting him petrified me.

There he was, this man reputed to be the contemporary equivalent of the Delphic oracle: an odd little man with eyes like the greenest searchlights, a wonderfully high-pitched laugh, little ferret teeth, and an incredibly gentle voice and manner. Panic! The colleague who had recommended him invited us both to dinner and of course I left the table in tears, whereupon Alan explained to the stunned assembled that I was suffering a love-related trauma and there was a sudden exhalation of understanding.

I made an appointment for a consultation but chickened out an hour beforehand and sent my cynical and debauched flatmate, a futures broker, in my place. My flatmate turned up with no explanation, Alan stared through him and announced that as a Taurean, he had an interesting year ahead. My flabbergasted flatmate asked him how he knew that he was a Taurean. "I can see it in your eyes," Alan dismissively said, before starting to ramble on about the commodities markets, how he would be happily married and a father within three years, and that he would change jobs. He also informed him that he would be robbed twice in the next six months and that there was nothing he could do about it.

My flatmate was the original nightmare party animal whose idea of a long-term commitment was remembering a woman’s name until the next morning. He is now the most spectacularly content husband and father of two children over whom he coos like a pigeon. He has also changed jobs and was robbed twice in six months - once in the middle of a busy thoroughfare in the early afternoon. The accuracy of this reading gave me the courage to see Alan.

As each prediction came true, I was both bewildered and gratified to understand that what I had as a child been told was fantasy - that is to say, a real kind of magic in the world - did exist. This had a considerable impact in my life. I don’t believe that Alan is fully human. He is, in my opinion, a cut above ordinary people. It sounds hackneyed to say that he is on a different plane, but there is no other way of describing it; Alan taps into electromagnetic fields, he sees things others cannot, he has access to knowledge denied the rest of us. His gift caused me to realize that my perception of the world - empirical, pragmatic, essentially cynical - was genuinely limited; there was a terrible gap in my approach to life. I had forfeited the connection to my heart. A comforting factor was also his lack of paraphernalia - no faerie earrings, no cosmic accoutrements, no crystal balls or wands or airbrushed posters of dolphins.

The one random factor in his readings is timing, and he doesn’t pretend otherwise. At times, I have felt that in knowing him, I have touched God. Embarrassing to acknowledge, really. I adore his level-headedness and his philosophy, a philosophy he lives rather than merely preaches. There is no divisiveness in his world-view; to Alan, all is one, rather than the self-serving dualism of the self-righteous. His impact on my life has been immeasurable, and I think I am a far better person for knowing him.