Cool beans...

What’s in the bowl? Beads, stones, my future?

Well they aren’t beads or stones. They're swamp seeds, a mixture of wild bush beans and coffee beans.

My oldest daughter, Cloë, brought them back for me from Uganda. She was there a couple of months go working with local people, educating them on contraception and other associated behaviours. She was based in a town called Jinja, on Lake Victoria, close to the source of the Nile, and stayed at Gately, a very nice hotel right on the lake.

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Now, Uganda isn’t England, and when I told her to check her shoes for scorpions and spiders each morning and before going out onto her balcony to make sure that there weren’t any dangling snakes, I think she thought that I was joking. She soon learnt that I wasn’t. Poor Cloë hardly got any sleep because of the lizard circus that performed all over her ceiling each night. They were only small, but lizards are lizards, and if you are worried by them, well… you are worried by them - and Cloë is. Personally I think they are fascinating – but then they weren’t on my ceiling.

About the beans - Cloë got them from a man called Bernard who collects them from the bushes and shrubs growing wild locally and makes them into jewellery. He made her a fridge magnet from a piece of wood with her name burnt onto it, as a gift for giving him the idea of using his skills to start making fridge magnets for tourists, he even spelt her name correctly (umlaut and all), now there’s gratitude. I used to make fridge magnets on the pier, so perhaps fridge magnets are in the blood, I may tell you about them some time.

What she didn’t know about the beans, which I have subsequently researched and found out (à la Google), is that these beans are used by the local witch-doctors and Shaman (Xhosa Sangoma) for foretelling the future. You simply tip the beans out of your hand or from a dish onto the sun-beaten earth, look for pictures in the patterns they make after they’ve fallen, and then… interpret them.

I had no sun-beaten earth, but I did have a dish - the one that Cloë brought me back from Uganda to keep my beans in - and I’m pretty damn good when it comes to interpreting things; although others might call it ‘making stuff up’, so I had a go.

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As you can clearly see my future looks very much like the creature that is depicted on the dish my beans are held in – I think it’s a goat, and according to my ‘Observer Book of Witch-Doctoring - Chapter Two – Portents of the Future’, a goat means that I should look out for danger – it is out there, and it wants me. I should be particularly aware of not falling backwards over low hedges, watch out for incoming heat guided missiles (particularly after a curry), avoid buckets filled with yellow custard, expect my trousers to fall down unexpectedly, and try not to attract people with tourette's – basically my future looks like an episode of Benny Hill without the scantily clad ladies.

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Looking more closely at my goat though, it also seems to indicate that lawn mowing is particularly well starred this month, as is cutting hedges, and generally tidying up in the garden. It also seems to be warning me that both Saturn and Mercury are casting a furrowed brow over my psyche until the end of the year; so self-improvement programs should be avoided (now simply isn’t the time) and I must totally disregard all smiley faced positive self-motivators who try to persuade me otherwise.

Mmmm… interesting - I’ll let you know if it’s true.