Do you believe in the cards? Even if you do, do you think people should 'dabble' with this sort of thing anyway? And perhaps most interestingly, how did it come about, what are the origins of this most durable method of divination?

I will say here I do believe it is possible to use the cards as tools to predict the future, and undersand the present...whether people should, I will leave that to you!

Up until about five years ago, I used to work in a factory. As a child I had learned a few card games from my parents and school freinds. In the factory we had a meal break, and a rest break. In the rest break (and the meal break sometimes) a card game called 'Fat' , a trumps variant, where the entire deck is distributed between four people, was played.

This was my first experience of playing cards on a regular basis, and I soon noticed somthing strange. By 'statistical' right, the cards should be distributed equally between all four players every time, but I noticed 8 times from ten, I would have the queen of hearts in my hand. For some reason not known to me, the laws of chance were skewed in my favour, in terms of having the queen of hearts. I moved to another shift, and found, it a well known thing, that if you wanted to know where the ace of spades was, you could bet it would be in the hand of this guy John Jones. It was such a common event for John to have a good hand in spades, they became known as 'Jonny's favourites'.

Physicists, statesticians and mathematicians these days believe that 'random' events are in fact predicatable, in that they are subject to mathematical laws. Probability theory, is now taught in the UK at GCSE level, (14 to 16 yr olds).This writer believes all psychic events, prediction, mediumship, OBE etc are subject to sensible scientfic rules and can be described by formual...its just we don't know them yet!

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