‘They’re quite closed down,’ comments my companion, as we watch two women outside the window while sipping our drinks. ‘They’re newly together… And they know we’re looking at them.’ We laugh and look away, but I’m fascinated by the possibility that, while I am picking up on body language alone, this woman can read more deeply into the lives of strangers.
We are in a lesbian bar in central London and my accomplice is psychic Kathy Mingo, who honed in on this couple just as they nipped outside for a smoke. The 40-year-old clairvoyant says she sees people’s auras, or energy fields, mixing in with each other all the time. She gives an example: the club she visited the previous night, which was packed with girls in their early 20s. When the dynamic is negative, what she sees is blobby and clouded.

‘Lesbian energy is very charged emotionally,’ she says. ‘I think it’s the sexual element that makes it so powerful. All female energies tend to be charged anyway, as with straight women friends, but the extra element of attraction doubles the intensity.’ Because the lesbian community is small and ‘lots of people have been involved with each other’, the vibes are all the more intense and can become unhealthy, especially at the end of the night when everyone’s fuelled by alcohol.
But as a lady-lover herself, Kathy stresses that she’s not slagging off her own community – she’s just concerned that we don’t always look after ourselves as well as we might. I think I know what she means.

Which of us hasn’t been tempted to jump into bed with the wrong woman, with the forcefield of a dyke club buzzing around us in all its complexity?
She makes a comparison with her local straight pub in Sutton. ‘The energy is more male oriented. It’s a less complex, more overt energy. In general, straight clubs are also sexually charged, but it’s more in and out. That is, the energy pulls back and shoots forward, with female energy dipping into male energy, testing it, then pulling back.’
Kathy adds that she actually sees the threads that bind people to each other, which the rest of us usually think of as metaphorical. Between women, these often appear as cords of light that run from one woman’s navel to another’s, representing a connection at the sacral chakra.

We set off for a men’s bar to check out Kathy’s claim that gay male energy is different – less needy, more sexually charged, honest and open, with one guy putting out a vibe of what he wants, and another confirming that he wants it too.
We go into the first pub with a rainbow flag outside. It’s definitely more cruisy than the girl bar we’ve just left. Kathy instantly picks up a strong sexual vibe, but then goes cold and doesn’t know why. She is covered in goosebumps. Above our heads is a memorial sculpture fixed to the ceiling and I register that we’re in the Admiral Duncan pub, bombed by a neo-Nazi in 1999.

‘I’d forgotten a bomb went off in here,’ says Kathy, ‘but I was picking up cold vibes like someone was walking over my grave. I’ve never gone into a bar and gone cold like that before.’ A regular comes over to talk to her, asking what it is that she’s feeling, and confirms her impressions of the path of the explosion.
‘There was a heavy, open sexual energy in there, as I expected in a men’s bar,’ Kathy tells me on the pavement afterwards, still shaken. ‘But it’s overshadowed by the bomb.’
She also talks about seeing an image in her mind’s eye of a woman in a wedding dress, and here my professional scepticism kicks in: is Kathy seeing that particular vision of Andrea Dykes – the pregnant woman who tragically died in the explosion – because her wedding photo appeared in the papers at the time and is lodged in the back of all our minds?

Still, this intriguing therapist has already proved to me that she can pick up on things no-one has ever told her. Soon after we met up, she offered to give me a reading and went on to describe a feeling of ‘not being able to stop talking’ and an equally strong feeling of mental and physical exhaustion. As I suffer from mood swings (going from hyper and talkative to washed out and immobile) this certainly hit home. Other comments about my late grandmother were less accurate, but we were both unnerved by the way Kathy’s fingers swelled up as she talked about her, mimicking the arthritis my grandmother had in her hands (which I hadn’t mentioned).

It’s not unusual for the spirit world to intervene in Kathy’s everyday life, even when she’s not doing a reading. Just last week she was having her hair cut by a young woman when a voice kept announcing itself: ‘This is Steve, Steve’s here,’ until she could no longer ignore it. Kathy asked the hairdresser if she had recently lost someone by that name and the girl burst into tears. It was her grandfather, who had just died.
‘I saw a man in uniform,’ adds Kathy, ‘and I asked her if he had been in the Army, which he had. Then I asked whether he used to buy lightbulbs and plugs and the answer was that he bought them constantly – he hoarded them. When they were clearing his house they found a lightbulb in the middle of the floor.’ The suggestion is, she says, that his spirit left it there as a sign he was still around.

Kathy frequently keeps such messages to herself if they come through uninvited, but in the case of the hairdresser, she felt she had to tell the girl because it seemed to be her first experience of grief.
It’s more straightforward when the medium is approached directly by someone who needs her help. In addition to her interests in auras and the spirit world, Kathy believes in reincarnation and takes clients back to their previous lives via hypnosis. ‘Patterns in relationships can be repeating from earlier in life or from an earlier life,’ she claims. ‘The energy gets blocked and you can’t move forward.’

She also teaches psychic skills to beginners, and reckons we all have the potential to tap into more than ordinary perception. But her less clairvoyant acquaintances don’t always appreciate the side effects of all this extra-sensory activity. ‘The lightbulbs in my house buzz from energetic resonance,’ says Kathy, smiling, ‘and my friends don’t like it.’
Before we part, I ask what would help lesbians to create a more positive flow in our social spaces. You don’t have to be psychic to guess what she comes up with: drink less, so that the energies are less muddied, and take more responsibility for ourselves. But gazing into my own crystal ball, I can predict that isn’t going to happen in lesbo clubland any time soon.

Find out more at Kathy’s website: www.journey-to-the-soul.co.uk