PARANORMAL PERSPECTIVES: Debunking Myths & Embracing Curiosity

Mind Cake with Lee Crompton and Paul Beeson about mental health

Marvin. Marvin.

Marvin.

Oh, why have you named your cat after a member of jls?

They're my favourite band.

As I suspected.

Let's start a podcast about our mental health for no good reason why. Let's call it B Cake.

Hello, everybody, and welcome to another slice of Mind Cake.

Mind Cake with him, Lee Crompton and him, Paul Beeson. Paul Beeson. You're looking very ruggy rascal today, my friend.

My hair is inexplicable.

Yeah, your hair is very eraserhead and it is. You're very stubbly of chin.

I know. I've come off tour and I've just become a slob.

Yeah, you do look like you just slept in your car.

Yeah, actually, what. I. I've been to the gym this morning. That's what I was doing. So I got up, went to the gym. So that's why I look like this.

That's why you look like that because you've been to the gym.

Yeah, because, like, I did my hair this morning and then went straight out to the gym and obviously, like, you're running on the thing and getting all sweaty and that. So my hair now looks like this.

Do you not have a shower?

I didn't have time. It didn't have time to set as it. Yeah, that's what I've been doing my morning. What have you been doing with your morning, mucker?

Do you really want to know what I'm doing my morning?

Well, unless it's too profane for.

No, no, no, no. I have had, an ADHD assessment.

Oh, yeah.

For three hours.

Oh, mate.

So I'm quite tired.

I must be driving you mental with your adhd.

It was. Well, I don't know. I haven't. Haven't been fully diagnosed yet, but,

Well, well, we all know. We all know.

Well, I think it's. It's a split. It's a split decision. I think there's. There's those who go, no, I don't see it at all. And there's others that go, oh, yes, you definitely have it.

What. What did you have to do for three hours? It seems like a long time.

You. You had to talk about just your lifestyle, your mannerisms, your childhood, what you're like in relationships, what you're like in your job, what your. What you know, your pastimes, your hobbies. So we'll wait and see. I think there's an awful lot that resonated equally. There are a few things that didn't. So one of the questions, for example, Was in my childhood, was I particularly or even now, am I particularly impulsive or risk taking? I would say no, I'm not either of those things. I, I tend to sort of, you know, plan and attention to detail, kind of work my way through things rather than just impulsively making a decision on things or climbing a tree a little bit too high or whatever. I didn't, you know, was fairly well behaved as a kid. And so certain things I'm like, I think I'm supposed to answer yes to tick that box. But there's no point in fibbing. I mean it's not a test, it's not a pass or fail test. I just want to find out a bit more about myself and like I say, I don't. I'm not doing it for any other reason than there's been. Yeah, Dr. Jan, I think is in the. I think you, yeah, ah, maybe need to might ah, be interesting for you to get tested. Gemma, my wife. I think you also. Yeah, I think. But then you've had other people who know me well have gone, oh no, not at all. But then I think I've had 50 odd years of deflecting with humour and I think unless you know me particularly well, I mean I, I would say I've picked up a lot editing this podcast in terms of me listening and.

Me.

I mean how many times have I had to. When I'm editing myself, when I've thought of a question and a third of the way through that question I've gone off a tangent and thought of another question and then by the time I get to the end of, you know, as a snake kind of slithering through the desert from cactus to cactus and by the end, by the time I get to the end it's either I don't know what the original question was or it's four questions rolled into one.

So I think it'd be quite interesting going forward to have somebody on about adhd because I always thought it was just people who couldn't sit still and were a bit fidgety.

Paul: The tangents are what make this podcast what it is

Yeah, well, I mean you're, the tangents that you go off is.

I mean legendary words you're looking for.

Yeah. Nobody. You're so meticulous in planning a lot of stuff, especially around this podcast. And then when you, you plan all your questions and stuff and you have like reams of paper with loads of questions on it and as soon as you ask your first question, that's gone out the window, hasn't it? And Then you, then you. Because you've gone off on a tangent. Then you're like, right, how'd I get back into this?

Yeah, yeah, sequence.

Yeah, yeah. So you do, you do a lot. Meticulous planning. But then as soon as you start. Yeah, but that's fun. That's what makes the podcast what it is. It's all part of the experience, isn't it?

That is why we have five whole listeners.

that's why our loyal fan base keeps coming back.

Absolutely, absolutely love your tangents. They like my tangents. And they love your hair. Even though they can't see it, they can imagine it and imagine it. I'm gonna have to take a screenshot today. That is even by your status, Paul.

I know, yeah.

We've had an episode with the Wonderful Swales. Yeah, I really enjoyed that episode

Anyway, well, to even things out.

We've had an episode with the Wonderful Swales.

We did. Yeah, I really enjoyed that episode.

Which, which, which, which, which turned out to be. I feel more about Mother Nature and looking after the planet and, you know, rather than hubble bubble, toil and trouble. However, our guest, today, but in the interest of balance, is. She's editor of the Sceptic Magazine, I think, which tells you all you need to know about today's guest, Deborah M. So without further ado, let's get right into Scepticism.

Sceptic Magazine studies supernatural belief and folklore

Today we are privileged, and honoured to have Deborah Hyde, editor of the Sceptic Magazine with us. How are you, Deborah?

I'm very well, thank you. How are you, Lee?

I'm very well. I thought it'd be, timely to get you on in this time of Halloween and folklore and there's a new moon next week. I didn't even know there was 12 moons. Sometimes, sometimes 13. I thought there was like a couple a year.

Oh, right. No, there's. You get, you get 13 a year in a long year, apparently.

So I've only just found that out in the last couple of months and I'm 50, I've been half a century on the planet and I just found that out. But anyway, as your. The title of your magazine would suggest, you study supernatural belief and folklore, but you're not necessarily a believer.

Yes, no, I don't believe at all. And it's an interesting perspective because it's become sort of respectable over the last, I would say 10 or 20 years in academia. I'm not an academic, but, I have many friends who are and in academia they thought that you were being a bit frivolous if you spoke about all this stuff about ghosts and things like that. So There were people who had a passion for it but had to have it as a second string to their bow. People like Sue Blackmore, for example, who did a lot of really pioneering work in this stuff. And, these days, people like, Professor Chris French. And it's become. I think people have realised that it's a valid area of study because people do believe in these things and they. They have believed in them through most of human history. Therefore, you can't just write it off as being frivolous or silly and you don't have to believe in it to think. Cool. That's interesting that people come up with these things time and time again. That must say something about how human beings work. So I think that that's the element that we come at from.

Most people who get into the supernatural do it at a very early age

Okay, would you want to start by telling us a little about what you do and how you. As well. How did you lead. What led you down that path?

I think most people who are going to get into the supernatural do it at a very early age. It kind of just grabs you. It's one of those things and it's, It's one of those things that gives you a thrill, you know, it gives you a frisson. And I love watching the films and reading the books and all that kind of thing, but obviously that's just entertainment. I think I started out as a believer when I was a kid and you just try and consume everything you can on the subject. And the more I read, the more I realised that it was. It was actually a systematic way of thinking, although probably not accurate. So I read a book by. Called the Black Arts by a guy called Richard Cavendish when I was about 12 or 13. I shouldn't have really. I was a bit young for that, but, I realised that the attempt at magic was an attempt at sort of having a, systematic understanding of the universe and how to manipulate it. And the. The kind of philosophy and the efforts that people were making with magic really fed into the scientific revolution because it was about, you know, systematic forces that you could control in a systematic fashion. So I think I just. From that book I started just reading more and more. And by the time I was in my early 20s, I didn't. I didn't really believe in anything, but I was still fascinated by the subject.

Wow. Okay. So why do you think in the 21st century we still have this belief in ghost stories and. And that sort of phenomena?

It's very fashionable at the moment, isn't it?

It is, yeah.

Yeah. I'm one of the resident experts on the BBC podcast Uncanny sometime that when we do tours and things like that, I mean, goodness, the number of people that turn up at theatres and want to, want to see this as entertainment, it's. And the vast majority of them are believers as well. So it's really going through a phase broadly. There are two ways of looking at it. One of them is to say that this kind of belief is adaptive so that it, it helps people. And, there's something to that. But quite often it makes your life worse as well as making it life, your life better. Because if you, if you can believe in the comfort of a God, for example, well, demons of vampires aren't very comforting. And people have believed in those too. So, you know, so these kinds of beliefs are as disturbing as they are comforting. The other way of looking at it is coming at it from a different angle. And to say that these are accidental byproducts of a normal working human brain. And that's the kind of thing that they really concentrate on in anomalistic psychology. And if you like anomalistic psychology, you should buy the Science of Weird Shit by Professor Chris French, because he goes into all this stuff. Okay, so just to take a couple of examples, you, your memory isn't very good. For example, we don't record like digital devices do. We remember things that are important and in a certain way. And our memories tend to get sort of rounded off and optimised. So if you get three people see something and they talk amongst themselves, and by the time they're telling the story a week later, it would be very different to the original. The other thing is that we are very good at detecting what's called agency in our environment. So if, if you jump, might not be anything, might just be something falling over, but it's better for you if you assume, at least for a little while, that it might be something intelligent that's out to get you. You know, your ancestors did that, otherwise you wouldn't be here. So there are all sorts of things that a normal cognitive system does. And, and, and creating a world with supernatural agents in it could be just an accidental byproduct of that. And it doesn't cost anything. So it's just sort of stayed with us.

Yeah, and like you're saying, I suppose there's two things, isn't there, to that. There's, there's the. Well, going by your, your werewolves and, and horror and whatever. There's some people seek out that fear for fun through, whether it be horror films or haunted attractions. And Other people might find you could. You could say that's a positive. I'm not entirely sure why it's a positive and why people do that. Some people seek out that fear and other people are, like you say, get comfort from, you know, whether they believe in people who've passed on still being with us or, you know, some sort of spirits or whatever. I don't know. But I mean, going.

James says some people seek out fear for entertainment purposes

Going to the first bit. Why. What is it psychologically, I guess, that we see some people seek out fear for, let's say, entertainment.

For entertainment purposes. Yeah. Yeah. Well, given that I'm one of them, I suppose I should have a really good insight on it. I. I don't know, but I think it's pro. Having that excitement in a controlled environment. So I probably wouldn't be all that happy if you dumped me in a cage with a tiger, which would also be very exciting. But not uncontrolled. Yes, very uncontrolled. Whereas I can watch, I can watch a movie about the supernatural. And, Yeah, I mean, it's just. It's just titillating and thrilling, but it's also very controlled and funny enough. An awful lot of people also like to read things about serial killers and go to episode. You know, go to exhibitions with serial killers. And I find the difference is very important because I can't find that so, entertaining because it really happens. So I. I can't enjoy that for entertainment's sake, whereas I can enjoy demons because I don't believe in them. But I know that they're a potent source of kind of thrill for fictional purposes.

You know, I'd never thought of that because I would be. This is. Probably says this probably not put myself in a good light here.

I would say go ahead anyway.

Am I going to. It's not. With the first time on this podcast, I would say I'm the other way around. Supernatural films, like you say, is entertainment and whatever it. They can stay with me. Particularly Supernatural can stay with me for weeks afterwards. Like, I get this feeling of disassociation and I'm. I really don't cope well with some particular types of horror film. However, if there's a documentary on, I don't know, is it Jeffrey Dahmer? Yeah, I would say I find it entertaining, but I find it interesting from a human psychology point of view as to what the background was and what led them to do the things they did. So I find that. I wouldn't say entertaining, but interesting.

Interesting. Yeah, I agree with you. I. For. For Interest purposes. Yes. I was interested in Jack the Ripper at one point and I ended up learning an awful lot about Victorian social history through it. And that's. Yeah. And. And also it's got the mystery, it's like a conspiracy theory, because they never actually found out who it was for certain. So, Yeah, I think it's interesting, but it's not. It's not. It's not entertaining. It's not like going to, a country dance or a fairground or eating candy floss or anything, is it? It's a different kind of stimulation.

Yes, very much so. Very much so. I mean, have you got. Do you watch a lot of horror films?

Yeah, I like horror films and I like all the classics and I love the Guillermo del Toro ones. If. Since you're afraid of horror films, I would say to you, if you're going to watch any of them, these are the ones that are worth watching because they're not gratuitous and because the. Very often the horrific creatures are the ones most deserving of sympathy. It's a bit like a Frankenstein story. So your targets for pity and for anger, tend to be unpredictable and you've got the, You've got the raising of tension with the direction, but it isn't someone's head being sawn off or something just sort of gross and unpleasant like that. I. I think Guillermo del Toro is a real artist and I really like his stuff.

So you're. They're your favourite?

Yes, yes, I think so. I think I like. I like loads of them. I mean, there's all the classics, you know. I think the Exorcist was a major piece of art and the Wicker man is fantastic. And there was a one recently that had real vibes of the Wicker man, actually. It wasn't a supernatural horror, but it was a kind of. It was a psychological horror and I'm just looking it up as we. Yeah. Speak no Evil. starring James McAvoy. Oh, if you enjoyed the Wicker man, you'll love this.

Speak no Evil.

Yeah.

Okay.

Were you ever religious? Did you grow up Catholic or anything

Were you ever religious? Did you grow up Catholic or anything?

No, I was. I don't know why I'm laughing. I went to Sunday school, even though none of our family were religious. Now, I don't know whether my mum. My mum does listen to the podcast. Mum, if you're listening, was it just free childcare on a Sunday morning for a couple of hours?

I don't know.

I don't know why I went to. Why I went to Sunday school. But no, I would. I wouldn't say I was religious, no.

All right. Because a lot of people who, can't really cope with horror films, I find that they've sort of. They. They started out with quite religious backgrounds and they let them go. And I think it might be a subconscious worry that they've joined the wrong team. You know, they get nervous of being reminded about the supernatural things.

But, yes, with everybody thinking about it, this is the supernatural that gets to me. So I could.

So one of my favourite horror films has to be the Shining

So one of my. I would say my favourite has to be the Shining.

Oh, yeah. Fantastic. Yeah.

Yeah. Have you seen us?

No, I haven't. Was it good?

I liked it for no other reason than the performances where they're playing their own doppelganger.

Okay. Yeah, that sounds good. Sounds like, you have those in folklore, but you've got doubles, and they're called fetches in Celtic folklore. And if you see your own, it could be a sign of impending death. but if you scold it and tell it to go away, then you can. You can avoid it, so.

Well, I think that's the thing. There's a lot of folklore, I, think, attached to that film. And it tries to address many different things. It's over. It gets a bit confused at one point because it's trying to do this Hands Across America thing. And there's a lot of imagery where there's symmetry. So there's a lot of, like, scissors.

Yeah.

I think that's probably the cusp of my. I wouldn't want anything more distressing than that. That's probably my limit is. Is us.

Oh, okay. Okay. Well, that sounds like. Sounds like it. For your wife's sake, if nothing else, you should probably. You should probably not go further into the horror film thing because the nightmares, you might end up sort of shouting out in the middle of the night. That would disturb her, wouldn't it?

Absolutely. Absolutely. I remember watching Poltergeist as a child.

Yeah.

Absolutely. Terrified me. There's a bit where there's maggots in the sink or something all come out. And I remember that. Yeah.

When I was a kid, I read the Amityville Horror, the book. And there was a bit there where the guy went down to the sort of boathouse attached to the house, and he looked back and he could see a pig with glowing eyes.

Jesus.

One of the windows. And I was just transfixed with fear. I mean, it was like it was midnight or something. I couldn't get up for a week as I was too scared to move. I Mean, you know, there are these things really stay with you.

Yeah. Which again goes back to a real question. Why would you do that to yourself? But there you go.

There's a full moon coming up on Wednesday and people have superstitious associations

One thing we did talk about and there's a, there's a full moon coming up on Wednesday I think and I did say to you, well maybe we should talk about the moon because of you know, superstitions and, and what have you. I, I, I'm interested in that because my uncle was a big birdie police officer and he used to tell stories of how in the West Midlands police force they used to like draw lots on who was going to do the full moons because all the lunatics came out. And I've also heard stories from teachers including my mother in law who's like, you could always tell when it was a full moon because the kids go a little bit bonkers and I suppose my love of Harry Potter. I'm thinking full moons are a track, are associated with werewolves. But from what you're saying that's not necessarily the, the case.

It's, no, I'm not particularly, I mean the I think an awful lot of this is fictional. You know people picked it up, people where, you know, astronomy, ah, our decent understanding of the heavens and physics came via astrology and people were looking into the, into the heavens and there was clearly things that did make a difference. I mean the, the moon affects tides, it's observable. So they must, they didn't realise that you know, perhaps Jupiter and Saturn didn't affect us as much temperamentally. And so I think it took a long time to, to work out and science went through this and I think that medicine, I'm just thinking of Robert Burton with the Anatomy of Melancholy which would have been the 16th, 17th century, would have been talking about the phases of the moon and the effect it would have had on people's health and their temperament. So I think that that's kind of you know, late magic, early science attempts to, to put, you know, to attach some mechanistic attachment to the moon between the moon and humans and probably with folklore, look, you can go out and you'd see everything on a full moon. So if it was, if there was no light then people wouldn't have gone out at night and would have been unlikely to have ambiguous or supernatural experiences. So it's in general, I mean there is so much folklore to do with moons, and you know, moon goddesses, Celine and all this kind of thing. So, so people do have mystical associations with the moon but the idea that, you know, as regular as clockwork, a werewolf comes out at a full moon is probably more derived from fiction than it is from, from sort of witch hunting records.

And do you, so do you, I take it you don't think that there's a correlation between people's behaviour and full moons?

I don't think so, no. No. I think probably if you did, if you did double blind studies and, they were well controlled and, you know, all of that kind of thing, you'd probably find that people are just people noticing things at times that are significant to them. We're not actually very good at kind of being impartial about the world. You need experiments to do that.

I saw that you were on. I don't, I don't watch Daytime Terms, is it this morning?

Yeah, I did a few of those.

Yeah, did a few of those. One in particular that, stood out was they had, George Best's wife on,

Yes.

And she was convinced she was being haunted by George. And I just thought, for listeners intrigued by the paranormal but mindful of their mental health, what sort of questions do you think they should be asking themselves if they feel that they had a ghostly or a spirit experience?

Well, this is kind of an interesting question to ask someone like me, who, is the resident killjoy at any of these sessions, because I think a lot of the time George Best's wife. Was her name Angie? No. Oh, no, no, she was, she was much earlier. yeah. Any. Anyway, the lady that I did the interview with was actually very nice and perfectly, sane and it was nice talking to her. So I, I, this doesn't apply to her. But an awful lot of people who you end up going up with, for the purposes of debates or for TV sessions, yeah, might be a bit vulnerable. And, I'm quite keen now to make sure that people aren't, because it hadn't occurred to me before, but, but they can be, you know, they can be in the middle of a crisis and be very, very fixated on a subject. And UFO people, for example, a lot of UFO people really, really get into it and they can be quite sort of shaky and unhappy by the time they, they come off the stage. So it's interesting to be able to, you know, to be able to actually draw that line, to say, no, this person shouldn't really be dropping themselves in it, potentially when they're at a bit of a delicate stage in their lives. On the other hand, I would say that the vast majority of people who have Strange experiences. There's nothing wrong with their mental health at all. It's perfectly natural, it's perfectly human to have bizarre experiences. And there are lots of explanations for why this may be the case. So I didn't think that she was, I didn't think she was sort of emotionally challenged at all. I think she'd lost her husband, she'd had a few spooky experiences and she believed in ghosts and lots of people do, so that's fine.

I guess like you say, you're in sticky territory and I'm sure you're very, very compassionate and not blunt with them. But like, but I can imagine because I mean, take her for example. She was saying that things had moved like heavy chests of drawers that would take three people to lift.

Yeah.

Had moved and she could tell by the marks in the carpet. And you're there saying, I don't think that actually happened. So you know, without putting too fine a point of it, you go, well I think you've A, either made it up or B, just a little bit wrong, got it wrong. And people don't like being told that they're. I'm not saying you're, she's, you're saying she's a liar. But yeah, people don't like being challenged in that way because I suppose they, they're entrenched in. Well, I did see it and, and the furniture did move and I did see a ghostly figure past the window or whatever it is. And, and so you. I can see how I'm thinking of sort of a Nikki Campbell type debate show in particular where you've, where you've got very entrenched views on one side and the other. And I can imagine. Have you ever come across there where it has got a little bit frisky.

I have been in one of those Nikki Campbell type shows and I think he's, I think he's an incredibly good referee. I think he's really very good at giving everybody the the time that they need and about, and treating everybody respectfully. in the green room in one of those, there was. I ended up having a conversation with a couple of women and I, I think they, that they were being accused of being stupid. And I said to them, I said honestly, no one thinks you're stupid. I mean this is, if this is the first time that anyone has encountered the idea that they might be wrong without being weak minded, then it might be a bit of a shock to them. But if they went into the subject a bit more and they realised that there are experiments, well controlled experiments and loads of them, which demonstrate that we're all really good at getting things systematically wrong. Then they would probably feel that it was aimed less personally.

M. We're full of ambiguity. and going back to what you said earlier about people misremembering or coming up with you. Have you seen the same thing coming up with completely different versions of the same event? Because we pick and choose. I mean, again, I'm pulling figures at me bum here, but I think the eye. I read something that the eye takes in however many, many million pieces of information every second and of that we recognise 30. So there's a lot going on and that's why apparently you get. So if you're doing something else, I could be talking to you now and two. Somebody two doors down could go, lee. And, my brain goes. Because it's picked out that one bit of information that I need for either survival or, you know, what instinct or whatever. Whatever you want to call it. But by virtue of that, if we're only getting a small percentage of our reality at any one moment, it's. It's pretty logical that what we take in, and what we understand is a. Is a small percentage of what is actually happening in reality. I mean, an example I've got is that my. My wife was driving. We, live out quite. Quite rural, in a rural location and she was driving back one night and she witnessed a car that had driven into a ditch and she got home and she rang the police to say that she'd seen this car and it's a white car, and she gave the location, rough location of where the car was and they sent the police out and they couldn't find it. However, about a mile up the road in a completely different location, they found a black car that had driven off the road. And, What. They rang my wife back to check. Did you mean this car or are we still looking for another white car that's further up the road? And it turned out, no, she completely misremembered the location. And even the colour, it was like black and white.

James Mcoy says what we think we see isn't necessarily what's happening

A completely different colour.

Yeah.

Now maybe that was because it was dark or, you know, you've only seen a flash of it, whatever. But I suppose it's a really rubbish example of the fact that what we think we see isn't necessarily what's happening.

Yeah, I mean, if somebody. If somebody a couple of doors down shouted out knee as well, you'd probably look around at that because there's enough information in there for you to just, to just recognise it.

Yeah.

And so it doesn't have to be perfect. Modern models of how we recognise things, say reckons that there are two elements to it. We don't have the working bandwidth to sample our whole environment at 25 frames a second and to record it all. And you've already pointed that out. So to a degree we take in a lot of information from around us and we specifically take in information that's changed. So if something's moving fast, for example, you know, you're not going to sort of stare at the piece of furniture in the corner that doesn't move. You're probably not going to take a lot of processing time on that. And at the same time we have models already installed in our brain of what we should be expecting. And so that's top down information, that's the stuff that you're expecting. It meets your, your perceptions coming up and they kind of meet in the middle and they make a mashup. So if you were living somewhere where there were big cats, you would, you'd probably do a double take and expect a jaguar for example, if you were in South America. But of course if you were on holiday, somewhere where there were lions, you might for a moment think, oh, jaguar. And of course it's a lion. Just because that's, that's, you know, that works with your software. So this is going to be part of your environment, part of your expectation. So a lot of people think that a condition called sleep paralysis leads towards strange experiences. But it'll be culturally specific as to what you think's happened to you. Some people think that there might be some old hag who's trying to throttle you. Some think that there's some kind of randy demon coming to try and seduce you and something that they're being abducted by aliens. And it kind of depends on your cultural software as to how you interpret this. Really quite well stood, well understood biological experience.

So with the new moon rapidly approaching, what you're saying is there is nothing to see here, we're all going to be okay?

I can't, I can't guarantee that because you might fall in a ditch. So there are, there are the.

Not because of the moon?

No. There are the same dangers there ever were. You could get mugged, you could get, fall into it, fall into a ditch, you could walk into someone's wing mirror, but you're as likely as ever to get attacked by a werewolf.

Yeah.

Which is A very, very low likelihood indeed.

Well, yeah, I mean, I guess I get something I'd not thought of before. Again, there won't be any surprise to you on the basis I only thought there was two full moons a year, that there might be a correlation between, like you say, the full moon and the light and the trick of the light, I guess.

Yeah. And the fact that, traditionally people would be out. We've only had lights in the street for the last, you know, few decades. The idea that the whole world would be completely illuminated whenever you want it, as it's very, very modern. So I guess people would only go out and be able to see things at full moon.

Yeah. Okay. I think it's a beaver moon. M. Whatever that is. On Tuesday and Wednesday.

Yeah. They've got all sorts of names for them. Harvest moons and everything. I don't know what they all are.

No. Okay.

Deborah, thank you so much for coming on. I know this is obviously a very busy time with you, with all the folklore and mysticism that's going on at this time of year, so I really appreciate you taking the time.

It's been good to talk.

Yes. Thank you very much. I'm away to do my homework now with James McAvoy and.

Oh, yes.

M. Yes.

I wish you a very happy Halloween.

And happy Halloween to you, too.

Paul says he's open to mysticism and the paranormal

Well, that was Deborah.

That was Deborah. And what did you think of that, Paul? Because I know you love the old, You know, mysticism and the. And the. I do.

I do. I love. I do love all the old, The mysticism and the paranormal and all that kind of stuff. Spiritualism, spirituality, however, I mean, that. That's just. That's kind of. My. My interest in that is sparked from a. I'm kind of, you know, like X Files, Mulder and Scully. Right. I'm. I'm definitely like a fox moulder. Like, I want to believe. I want. I want to see, so. But I have no tangible proof of a lot of stuff, the stuff that I like to believe in, but I'm just really interested in it all. I've got nothing against sceptics, of course, because that's. I mean, you're. You're very sceptical, right? You're. You're. You're the Dana Scully.

Yeah.

Yeah.

I mean, I don't, I have crystals on my desk, for example. Do I think they're really doing anything? Probably not, but they're quite nice to look at, and they're not doing any harm. So,

And if key from keys. Crystals is Listening. He doesn't mean it. He doesn't mean it.

I don't mean it. And I'll see you in Knutsford in a few weeks. Don't hold it again. She won't be listening.

He's fine. Yeah, but I think I'm kind, I'm sort of on the fence, do you know what I mean? So like, I am open to stuff like that, the sort of more mystical side of life and I would love to see some kind of evidence of that, but I'm m not like an outright non believe like that. It's all horseshit because I'd rather be a glass half full kind of guy. Do you know what I mean? Be optimistic and be open to that rather than just dismiss it outright.

I think you can be a half glass empty. If it's just a load of nonsense though, that's fine.

until you. Yeah, whatever.

Like Hearts winning the league.

It could happen, mate. It could happen. Nine points clear now.

We've running out of time already.

Oh, Jesus. it's only a quick bookend this week, isn't it, Lee? This, this episode? I should say. Yes, it is because we've got stuff to do. We've got stuff to do, places to go, people to see.

Well, what it. Well that's, that's a good segue into what are you going to do this afternoon?

I've got a few things to do actually, so I've got, got some admin.

No, no, no, no, not the admin. We got time to talk about the admin. what are you doing this afternoon that relates to the previous episode?

Paul says he is going to do some grounding on the beach

Jesus. All right, I am going out for a walk, get, get my nature on and I'm going to do a bit of grounding. I'm gonna, I'm gonna go down to the sea because I live near the sea and I'm gonna go and do some grounding on the beach. Grounding? Not grinding. Grounding on the beach?

No, nobody had thought of that other than you, Paul. Again, I don't want to be pedantic. It's not in my nature to be pedantic about these things. however, is it grounding if it's on the beach or is it just walking barefoot, along the beach, but.

Your feet are in contact with the ground, with nature, natural sand.

Yeah, no, I get that, but I always thought the grounding. I don't know why, but always imagine grounding like walking in grass, whereas walking along the beach is just having a walk along the beach.

Well, do you know what you take.

Your shoes and socks off, don't you?

For balance? I'll stand on the beach for a bit, and then I'll go and stand on the grass for a bit and I'll compare the differences. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Okay.

I'll come back to you.

Thanks. If you wouldn't mind. What are you doing? I'll probably just go for a snooze. Knackered. Bye.

What are we to finish?

As always, take care of yourself, be kind to others, and in the words of Dr. Jan, don't be a dick. Thank you for listening.

Let's start a podcast about our mental health for no good reason why. Let's call it Fire Cake.