The original Sir William Nettleton, served the court of Queen Elizabeth the first, and dreamed of holding the distinguished rank of as lord warden of the water closest, but sadly he never advanced beyond his post of holder of the royal wet cloth on a stick. Sir William managed to explored no where, didn’t discover a vegetable, was crap at bowls and when the Spanish armada was spotted off the coast of Plymouth he was sharing his bed with a lady of negotiable pleasure. In fear for his life he ran trouser-less to catch the coach to Exeter deserting the Plymouth hoe, upon whom Drake was playing with his bowls… Which casts the whole Sir Francis Drake legend in a new light i am sure you will agree*
*almost none of this is true… Almost none.
The current Willam Nettleton who can trace his roots back to Devon in January 1589, though for some reason he shortens his professional name to appear cooler and writes as Will Nett… Occasionally Will Nett sends me blog posts , they tend to be entertaining, well received, deceptively intelligent reads…
For some reason Will has been playing with Tarot cards apparently…
The Telling Deck
Fate shall roll its dice; fortune play its hand
A path ahead will open, to lead you through its land
I haven’t turned a card in almost three years, yet here I am sitting across from the dealer, about to resume. My anticipation is tempered somewhat by the distracting possibility that the dealer’s hair might turn into a load of snakes or something. That’s the sort of thing that happens when you get your Tarot read, isn’t it? For these are not the cards of casinos, canasta, and Copperfield.
Before me lies the Rider Waite deck; 78 tablets, comprising the Major and Minor Arcana, that will open the doors of perception to a self-confessed cynic.
The atmosphere is suitably charged. Lights are low. A cat is present. No-one is sure who it belongs to- if a cat can ever be said to belong to anyone- or indeed who belongs to it. It looks keenly from cards to participants and back again with the customary feline arrogance that suggests it knows every possible outcome that may unfold, before chasing a moth around the room with all the energy and enthusiasm as if the moth owed it £50.
She caresses the cards, this Solitaire of Fate, in a dance as old as water.
“Relax,” she says.
I don’t.
She should’ve said “Whatever you do, don’t relax,” ensuring that I would do precisely the opposite. An ice-cold slug of Tunel sits like heavy mercury in a glass at my hand. The cat will boot it over soon enough, and reign all Hell down on proceedings, just as soon as it’s finished with the moth.
I look under the table to see if the dealer has a club foot. Inconclusive. ‘Always look at man’s foot before you play cards with him and don’t play if he has a cloven foot’ some mead-addled serf once proclaimed, in a well-travelled piece of advice. Amenable as the dealer is, asking to inspect her feet feels a bit fetishy so we skip straight along to the deal. I fan out the deck face down and select 12 cards, as instructed.
She lays them out and I wonder if the cards have been scrubbed with sage, which I read somewhere is the standard cleaning practice for the Tarot. She tells me not to get distracted but now I’m thinking about the out-of-date parsley in the fridge. Or is it coriander? I can’t remember.
Focus, Will.
They’re a rum bunch of coves, the folk depicted on the cards. The Devil goes down the BDSM route by chaining together Adam and Eve. I think it’s Adam and Eve. The cat has run off with my glasses. The Hanged Man looks surprisingly relaxed for someone upended and swung by his ankles from a gibbet. “He waits, the Hanged Man. And waits” she assures me.
Tick followed tock followed tick
The Page of Swords evidently gets his pantaloons from the same haberdasher as the comic book depiction of Iron Man.
The Fool is a foppish throbber so preoccupied with the carnation- the flower, not the milk- in his hand, that he’s about to stride straight off a cliff edge. Even his dog seems to be encouraging this latest endeavour, presumably to get rid of him once and for all.
The wise man does at once what the fool does finally
My own hand strikes me as somewhat predictable, although interpretations on what the cards mean to different people do of course vary.
The Hermit appears.
The hermit is the person to whom the judgement of a society matters most
“He’s been out three times today,” she adds, before asking if I’m particularly reclusive.
I’m not, but I do occasionally wear a full-length mohair smock and rope belt when I’m shuffling around with my candlestick in my hand, very much in the vein of the hermit depicted.
The Three of Wands is off on holiday. Yep, that’s me; looking for the next beach, or airport, and the accompanying Knight of Pentacles represents slow, steady, stability.
“You’ll meet a woman with a foreign accent,” she teases, somewhat lasciviously. This isn’t as revelatory as one might think, given that in the last 12 months I’ve visited six foreign countries, and spend a lot of my professional life conversing with people whose first language isn’t English, but it intrigues, nonetheless.
The cards themselves are merely a vessel with which to operate; a ham butty or an old bike pump would be sufficient for a dealer of this apparent level of skill, as long as “it’s got your energy on it” I’m told. She’s drawing vibes from all around us, and strays off beam on occasion- I suspect the financial comfort discourse fuelled by the money card is offered to most as a reassurance of sorts- but it’s largely irrelevant to me. Or maybe it’s hugely relevant and I don’t know it yet. Disappointingly, Death doesn’t appear, but I’m shown the card out of curiosity.
And I looked, and behold a pale horse: and his name that sat on him was Death, and Hell followed with him
That’s right; the cat’s black.
I’m especially struck by the Tower, and its ejection via the tower window of what looks to be Jedward in their pyjamas. What then, to make of it all collectively, these curious characters drawn from the pen of ‘Pixie’ Smith, the artist who designed this deck, over 100 years ago, laid out on the kitchen table, reaching down through the ages?
She carefully shepherds the deck into a silk wrap and places it down in front of her, as I muse on events. I’m more entertained than anything else, but it feels surprisingly insightful; dramatic, even. Joan Didion once said; ‘I don’t know what I think until I write it down.’
This might just be the first time I’ve written about anything, and not known what I think about it afterwards.
Will Nett is currently working on his first novel, Hogweed; a screwball semi-autobiographical account of his Great grandfather’s obsession with Marguerite Wadeer. The tale sees Will tumbleweeding through much of Europe and North Africa, with fellow wanderer, Bip, as he slides slowly into an Underworld of criminality, madness, and religious zealotry.
His Amazon Page is here
The Passing Place 