Gypsies, Tramps And Me.

"I used to think I was some kind of gypsy boy, before you let me take you home" - So Long, Marianne, Leonard Cohen.

Like Leonard Cohen, I used to think I was some kind of gypsy boy but yt wasn't until after last night's London Fortean Society talk - at The Bell in Whitechapel, Gypsies and the Supernatural, that I asked the speaker Jeremy Harte the question I'd not been able to ask in the Q&A. I'm not sure how relevant it was to Harte's interesting, if sometimes hard to follow, talk but it was one that had been eating away at me so it was nice to finally ask it.

Growing up in Tadley in the 70s and 80s, gypsies and gypsy lifestyles were never far from the conversation. There was a weird kind of duality about it. It felt like nearly everybody, my own family included - one relation lived in a gypsy caravan, claimed to be, in some way, descended from gypsies yet it also felt that nearly everyone, in some way, hated the gypsies.

Not necessarily all the gypsies. Just the bad ones. The ones that were always fighting, the ones that killed coppers, the ones whose unwashed children never went to school, and, most of all, the ones who - when they moved on - left behind them a fucking big mess. Those gypsies were the bad gypsies and in 1980s Tadley nobody called them Roma or Romani. They were gippos or they were dids. They were diddies and they were diddicoys.

Diddicoys was the term used for gypsies that were not true Roma and the term was often, correctly or not, applied to Irish travellers. When I asked Jeremy Harte, a man whose brain I imagine to be like a slow motion explosion of a pile of Encyclopaedia Britannicas, about the term 'diddicoy' I was worried I was using an offensive, slanderous, or even racist term.

Luckily, he laughed it off while at the same time confirming to me that it IS generally a term used to demean gypsies, to identify the bad gypsies. Harte has done a lot of research into gypsy life and knows a lot of gypsies and one thing he seemed certain of is that they've had to deal with a lot worse than that. His talk was not so much about the supernatural powers of the gypsies, SPOILER ALERT - they have none, so much as why it's commonly believed they do.

He began in the 16th century when large numbers of gypsies started to arrive in Britain. Many settled in Norfolk, the Welsh borders, Cornwall, and, most of all - it seems, in what we'd know call M25 country. Places like Orpington and Bromley. According to Harte's telling, and he can be a little mischievous when the mood takes him, the gypsies decided on the boat to England that they'd tell people, incorrectly, they were from Egypt.

Egyptian culture, from pyramids to pharoahs and from sphinxes to sarcophagi, had a rich and celebrated heritage so Egyptian visitors, the theory went, would be more welcome than random Indians and Romanians. The scam worked and soon Egyptians was shorted to Gypsies.

But, at a time when Britain was very monocultural, these new arrivals struggled to make ends meet. A belief took hold that gypsies, wandering around barefoot, wearing red shawls, and singing their fancy songs, had certain powers and they were solicited by non-gypsies for fortune telling purposes. Some of the gypsies saw that there was much needed money in this so began happily telling those fortunes. Some even struck on the idea that fortunes needed repeat telling so multiple bookings were made and multiple deposits of cash fell into gypsy hands.

Sidelines in selling supposedly lucky heather, particularly - for some reason - at the Epsom Derby, brought in even more money and even when fortune telling was legislated against the gypsy soothsayers found a way round it. They'd set up stalls on the street with several caged birds. Into the cage would be dropped small pieces of paper with fortunes written upon them. A curious visitor would pay money and a bird would pick up a piece of paper. That way, the gypsy wasn't telling the fortune. The bird was. No law broken.

It's a curious tale, for sure, but it's just one of many that Jeremy Harte told us last night. In that he was, not unlike the gypsies, a spinner of quite exquisite and extraordinary yarns. With Jeremy Harte, you really need to be there to get the full experience. My blogs can't, and shouldn't, do his talks justice but I hope I've given you a very small taste of the evening. Thanks to Jade, Scott, Michael, Tim, and David for keeping me company, thanks to the London Fortean Society for hosting, and thanks, once again, to Jeremy Harte for a great evening.