Henri Llewelyn Davies

Horoscopes - Jeanette Winterson's website

2009-03-18T15:40:00.000-07:00

I currently write monthly horoscopes on the writer Jeanette Winterson's very large and impressive official website - if you'd like to read them, please press http://www.jeanettewinterson.com/horoscopes.asp Previous readers of my blog, many of whom are very literary people, might enjoy the poetry I've included for each sign, alongside the horoscopes! (Even if you're not so keen on horoscope columns in general!)

Jeanette has a fascinating site, with all sorts of jewels on it, if you're interested in her work - to get to her site in general click http://www. jeanettewinterson.com

I used to write numerous horoscope columns, including for big magazines like Cosmopolitan, TV Times and Woman's Own.

Nowadays, writing for Jeanette's site, I can choose 12 poems each month - by poets of the relevant starsigns, to go with each sign's horoscope. This is a very novel and absolutely huge pleasure for me! Hope you like your poems!

2009-03-18T15:39:00.001-07:00

New direction for blog

2009-03-18T15:27:00.000-07:00

I have taken down the bulk of my blog entries, which were primarily info about several generations of my family - intended for eventual publication as a book. I am now writing the book and may resume the family blog at a later stage.

Due to some incomprehensible techno-bug, I have had endless trouble getting onto the blog, most of the time, for many months now - which has been offputting! If I can ever get onto the blog again, I may take it in a different direction - perhaps talking about my work as an astrologer/psychic.

I've left people's comments up on the blog, although not the bulk of what I wrote in the entries, as everyone was very kind to comment at the time, and might want to have another look (sorry if this is baffling to some, because my original entries aren't there now - just the titles).

I've left the Daphne du Maurier piece/my account of a very accurate medium - the most recent entry - still up on the blog. This is because I want to give credit where it's very much due to all who work in that very difficult and often nebulous field of proving survival after death by tuning into people's relatives (it's not my personal branch of psychic work, although I do use intuition very strongly in order to give people personal readings on the telephone. My own work is described/explained on my website: http://www.henrillewelyndavies.com)

Daphne du Maurier: in about 1990, I went to see a medium who appeared to 'connect' with her uncannily

2009-01-01T07:55:00.000-08:00

A reader of my blog kindly commented on my last entry, saying they wanted to read about the session I had with a medium who 'brought through' Daphne du Maurier: here is my account of the really very remarkable (and, for me,unusually convincing) experience....

Many mediums are very sincere and honest (and underpaid!), but I've rarely come across

anything so uncannily, seemingly accurate as the session I had with a medium which is described below. This was in about 1990.

I called myself Miss Davies (or 'Davis'), when I first phoned up the medium for a 'sitting', as such things are called. (I was thinking it was better to err on the side of paranoia: I was writing a 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, so all this made sure I was a very anonymous figure when I walked in.)

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

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

'It's a distinguished lady - she's bringing in stacks of paper 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 Henri).

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.

The medium reported that 'this lady' said, 'When I was on 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 usually like to whistle?'

'And she's taking me to the West Indies, to Jamaica,' he added. 'But she always wanted to come home when she's 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" ' , said the medium.

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 some extent. The ' communicator' had died quite recently and no biographical books had come out yet - a fact the medium mentioned. He swore later on that he knew nothing about the communicator - and even if he had done, including subconsciously, there was no reason he should have linked her to me, sitting in front of him.

Explanations as follows:

The novelist Daphne du Maurier - the 'spirit communicator' - was my grandfather's first cousin. 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 to her aged 14, saying, 'I love your book "Rebecca" '. The whole tone of the sitting was a little bit impersonal, as befitted that particular relationship.

She was born in 1907. The medium's dates, as stated originally, did pan out. And she famously wrote the popular novel 'Jamaica Inn' (as in the earlier Jamaica reference). She rarely 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 that 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 a house called Menabilly, which she was only ever allowed to rent, not buy. She was forced to leave this house later in life, and never really got over the loss of it. Hence what I initially construed as mystifying waffle from the medium, about 'always seeing her home in her mind's eye'. (At this point in the sitting the medium also mentioned that she now had 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. The medium's 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 the medium who he was talking about, he said, 'Who that?' (Not his sort of thing, he said, though he did say he remembered seeing Hitchcock films that 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. But I liked this sitting a lot, one of the best I've ever had with a medium (and I've been to scores of not-so-good ones, however honest and well-meaning). It's nice for me, because I know I fed that medium no information (others must believe what they feel is right).

Mostly for mothers of small, awake babies, to show they're not alone in their exhaustion

2008-10-28T11:41:00.000-07:00

Siegfried Sassoon's and my mother's landlord (again)

2008-10-25T08:10:00.000-07:00

Paris, Jane Llewelyn Davies and the J. Walter Thompson Advertising Company

2008-10-25T07:07:00.000-07:00

Genetic Memory - George du Maurier and John Llewelyn Davies

2008-10-19T13:22:00.000-07:00

Later Llewelyn Davieses at Campden Hill Square, with an element of Siegfried Sassoon

2008-09-28T14:59:00.001-07:00

Jack Llewelyn Davies

2008-09-21T14:11:00.000-07:00

Snapshots and old photographs

2008-06-06T09:33:00.000-07:00

Handwriting

2008-06-03T14:37:00.000-07:00

Stamps on walls and ceilings

2008-06-01T15:50:00.000-07:00

Peter Pan

2008-05-29T10:00:00.000-07:00

I'm afraid I never liked Peter Pan much as a child - in spite (or because?) of it having been inspired by my grandfather Jack and his four brothers - J.M. Barrie, in a much-quoted comment, said that he 'rubbed together' the five boys to make a 'spark' (of fire) that ended up as his most famous play.

I remember going to see the play in the theatre one Christmas when I was around eight, with my mother. I don't recall her saying what she thought of it (I suspect maybe I was telepathising her reservations about it - I was a very osmotic child, like many children). Anyway I recall loathing Tinkerbell. And my attitude to the bit where she was going to die if children didn't clap their hands to show they believed in fairies was 'pass me the bucket'!

Of course I always wanted to fly like a bird - who doesn't? - but I was sniffy about Neverland, full of boys playing Indians etc. An odd reaction, when I was totally obsessed with wanting to visit 'otherlands', such as C.S. Lewis's Narnia and the parts of the past etc where E. Nesbitt's,

Edward Eager's and Philippa Pearce's fictional children landed up.

Later I reread the play - I thought Wendy was sappy, not a rivetting character (probably always did think exactly that) and Mrs Darling her mother seemed on the yukkily sentimental side... Sexism? Well, er, double sexism actually - poor Mr Darling is portrayed as a bad-tempered wimp and, if I recall aright, most of the pirates are pretty thick. And then of course there's the crashingly appalling Captain Hook.

Yes, I know the whole point is that Barrie was being deliberately 'ageist' - only children could do any right. But Peter Pan himself? GHASTLY CHILD I always thought. One step further and he'd be up there with the terrifying psychopath child characters cooked up by William Golding in 'Lord of the Flies' and Susan Hill in 'I'm the King of the Castle'.

In the play's favour, I did like the concept of losing one's shadow (as when Peter's had to get sewn back on - by self-sacricing 'little mother' Wendy - urgghh!), and it's obvious that the play has many clever sly observations about life and Captain Hook has some really great lines (but then we all know the devil always has all the best ones).

Please, if people have got any thoughts about 'Peter Pan', do comment!

Michael Llewelyn Davies, 1900 - 1921, Number Four of J.M. Barrie's Five Lost Boys

2008-05-28T07:11:00.000-07:00

More Cornwall - People's Views

2008-05-18T14:58:00.000-07:00

Daphne du Maurier's (and my) Cornwall

2008-05-13T11:27:00.000-07:00

New blog...

2008-05-13T09:55:00.000-07:00

I've just set up this blog today!

If you'd like more info about my work, please visit my website, http://www.henrillewelyndavies.com/

If you'd like to see the interview with me I've just mentioned - re Daphne du Maurier - on Justine Picardie's excellent blog, please visit http://www.accessinterviews.com/