I once I continue even momentarily dozed off during a hot air balloon ride

I once, I continue, even momentarily dozed off during a hot air balloon ride. I know this because I dropped my camera and killed a sheep in the field below “No, no,” insists Jack. “You are definitely a dowser!” Well, that is terrific, I say. Can I dowse this week’s winning lottery numbers then? No, he replies, I can not `There are some things you can not ask a pendulum I can’t thank God for what I am doing. I asked the pendulum: “Can I thank God for what I am doing?” and it said “no” I can’t dabble in the spirit world, either.

Can I have a look Jack?”Sure,” he says.Jack says you can use anything as a pendulum A ring on a piece of string will do. His, though, is a little glass bauble thing on the end of a silver chain. I suspend it first from my right hand, then from my left, where it gives a little whirl. “Negative in the right! Positive in the left! You’re a natural dowser,” exclaims Jack excitedly. Jack, I say, I don’t want to put a damper on things, but are you sure you don’t mean natural dozer? I am certainly that.

Perhaps you need opals for that.He leads me into his consulting room, which is furnished from floor to ceiling with shelves of small bottles intriguingly labelled “sweet fleg”, “monkey sticks” and “banana stem” He travels extensively, collecting these remedies. He will say to his pendulum: “I need remedies for brain fatigue. Should I go to Goa?” If the pendulum swings and whirls energetically, “then I know I must”. Over the years, his pendulum has taken him to Goa and Nepal and Malaysia and the south of France and Israel but never, as far as I can make out, to Slough or Ikea on a bank holiday Monday, which is handy Anyway, I’m dying to have a look at his pendulum. Lead poisoning? “Yes, I dowsed it from watching her on television I could tell by the way she held her head. I told her sister-in-law, Sarah, then about a week later I had a call from Diana asking for an appointment.

She wanted to see me, she said, because my diagnosis of lead poisoning was 100 per cent correct. As a schoolgirl, she had pierced her right cheek with a sharp lead pencil and the point had broken off in to her face.” Using his special “lead extracting treatment” he was, he says, able to “pull out the poison” and help her hold her head up properly again. He then later gave her a crystal, an amethyst, to “help her mentally and physically” but not, it transpired, in the event of a car crash in a tunnel in France. Alas, this was all too late for his brothers, but “I now have the heart of a 20-year-old!” He expects to live to 140 Truly?”Yes YES!”Jack is a dowsing healer, yes. This means he goes about with a pendulum, divining which parts of our bodies are letting us down, which parts of our “magnetic field” are “weak” and then, using the pendulum again, he will dowse for the most effective remedy Fergie came to him suffering from “energy blockages” Cherie had swollen legs With Jerry Hall it was back pain With Diana, it was lead poisoning. “I measure myself against 45-year-olds.” And? “I’m measuring up pretty good. Look.” He touches his toes which, yes, is rather daunting, considering I am less than half his age and can’t do up my own shoelaces without feeling faint Jack says he should, by rights, have a weak heart Weak hearts run in his family Three of his brothers died young of weak hearts.

Famous healer, even, whose patients have included the Duchess of York, Cherie Blair, Jerry Hall and, yes, Diana, Princess of Wales Out he bounds from his consulting room He has white hair and a ruddy complexion. Certainly he looks fit and seems to have terrific energy for someone who has not only reached 81 in this life, but has had, he later reveals, 120 previous lives and can trace his origins back 97,000 years.Yes, he is in excellent shape, he confirms. Anyway, Jack’s clinic comes just after the cottages peter out. It is a rather out-of-place, breeze-block bungalow thingy set in the middle of a big field, next to his “Neolithic stone circle” imported from Wales. I go in and meet his receptionist whose name, I’m afraid, I never discover “Vertigo,” she says when she first introduces herself Good film, I say, not quite knowing what else to say “No, no I had vertigo Terrible vertigo I couldn’t walk this time last year I still can’t walk far but I can bike in to town And it’s all thanks to Jack!”
Jack Temple Healer.