SOLE TRADERS IN THE PARANORMAL

By Hugh Thomas

“Walk barefoot over hot coals burning at 1400 degrees F,” the advert said. “Walk free: all you have to do is raise £100 for charity - train and walk in a day - if you can walk on fire, what else can you do?” Fire walking seminars, usually aimed at executives or high powered sales people, are generally a lot more expensive. But this sounded like an opportunity to test my Humanist scepticism in the proverbial fire at an affordable price. So it was that I was one of forty people turning up at Bristol’s Ashton Court Mansion one Sunday afternoon in February, ready to strut my stuff, accompanied by Bristol Humanist Chairperson Margaret Dearnaley as photographer-in-chief. “That’s a funny thing for a Humanist to do,” said a philosopher acquaintance when I’d been after sponsorship for the motor neurone disease charity MONITOR. Unlike him I had read Simon Hoggart and Mike Hutchinson’s un-put-downable 1995 book Bizarre Beliefs (Richard Cohen, London £12.99). I knew that fire walking needed no mumbo-jumbo, and was out to practise what I preach, not do a U-turn into the twilight zone. The secret, explain Hoggsy and Hutch, is not in the feet or even in the mind, but in the physics and chemistry of the burning material itself. True, the coals are hot - throbbing away at 300 degrees F above what it takes to melt an aluminium engine block - but they are very poor at conducting that heat. It’s a bit like the difference between picking up a hot cup of coffee and just touching it. There isn’t time for your feet to get burned in the less than half a second at a time they are in contact with the glowing embers.

“What are some of the reasons people are here today?” asked cockney firewalk trainer Steve Critchley, as outside his wife struggled to get the coals going in the rain. "I want to prove to myself that there is nothing paranormal about this phenomenon," was my response. “That’s fine,” he replied, “...there isn’t.” This was a man I could do business with. Although there was a certain amount of Californian new age psycho-babble in the training that followed, neither teacher nor pupils seemed to take it too seriously. “This is all about controlling fear,” said Steve. “Fear stands for False Evidence Appearing Real; or in the context of fire walking there’s another definition - Fuck Everything and Run.” The training was mainly about how physically to walk (with purpose, and don’t look down) and a certain amount of psyching us up into the right frame of mind to do it. Take the first step and mother nature will sure-as-hell make sure you take the others, was the main message. At the end of the training and a leisurely tea, we trooped out into the rain, took our shoes and socks off, and queued up to walk. Everyone did it, no one was hurt, and nobody so far as I know felt they had done anything remotely paranormal. Feel-wise it was reminiscent of walking over sand on a Mediterranean beach in mid summer. As I collected my sponsorship money in the pub the next day, friends were not unimpressed by my feat - or should that be feet? “Did it hurt? How are your burns? Were you hypnotised?” they asked.

Of the photos that had come out - given the darkness, the ban on flash use in case it distracted the walkers, and the speed of the walk - the best showed me dressed in sacrificial white (well, actually grey track suit bottoms and an off-white T-shirt...) waiting calmly before the fire pit as fresh coals were shovelled on. Several people remarked on the picture’s religious feel. I felt a pull to milk the attention. “Levitation mate; Special Powers...” and even “Mind over matter,” were some of the airy platitudes I found myself uttering in answer to requests for explanations. When it comes down to it, even a Humanist can feel the tug to pose as fakir rather than faker - at least for a little while. A student scientist was on hand at the next table however, ready to prick my bubble. “No great mystery,” he said. “It’s just like the tiles on the outside of the Space Shuttle; you can pick them up at the corner even though the middle is glowing red hot, because they’re made of a poor heat conductor.” Cheers mate, I thought, as the new look in my friends’ eyes visibly faded and I became ordinary old Hugh Thomas again: so it was all nothing but a “trick”. Never mind though, the standard guru-issue purple track suit wouldn’t have suited me anyway. The subject changed. Spiritualism. Now that, the people round the table seemingly agreed, was a bit of the paranormal that’s definitely for real. One of them had a friend who’d just attended a spiritualist group with a three year waiting list. It was truly spectacular and totally convincing: spirit voices, ectoplasm, the lot. No sooner do you knock down one paranormal Aunt Sally than another one springs straight back up.

The above article was first published in Humanist News.

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