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Chapter 9 / An Agreement to Fantasise?

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'The rational, orderly, common-sense world of experience is a sham: behind it lies a murky and paradoxical world of shadowy experience and shifting perspectives'. Physicist, Professor Paul Davies.

Readers may have noticed that an unexpected word, hypnotism, has begun to creep into the Uri Geller story like an uninvited guest at a party. I had idly wondered early on in my research into Uri Geller whether the explanation for what I saw him apparently do - make a spoon bend of its own accord in the flat of my son's hand - might just lie in the field of hypnosis. The idea seemed too ludicrous, however. I have often read that hypnosis is credited in corny fiction and bad films with far more than it can actually achieve. But then, I have seen and admired the British stage hypnotist, Paul McKenna, apparently induce the same ridiculous private fantasy - be it riding a horse or swimming underwater - in each individual on a stage-full of people. Perhaps Uri Geller was more of a mind bender than a spoon bender?

Strongest among the competing theories I had thus far considered as an explanation for what we saw, and for the whole Geller phenomenon, was the idea that Uri's abilities to bend metal by the power of the mind exist in the majority of us, and that he somehow subliminally triggers our subconscious to cause us to produce such effects. This had to be the answer for the huge number of anomalous events I was told about which had happened at some distance from Uri.

If we accept for a moment that the power of the mind might be able to bend metal, some kind of subconscious triggering mechanism in third parties had, surely, to be the only way to explain how, for example, the El Al captain Gideon Peleg had seen a fork tine spontaneously bend when he was talking about Uri several hundred miles from him. Then there are the hundreds of thousands of reports from dozens of countries of people's broken watches and clocks coming to life, and their cutlery bending and leaping about when Geller appears on television. The same happens every time he appears on radio or TV. Towards the end of the writing of this book, a couple from Leeds, in Yorkshire, both highly educated crossword compilers for several quality newspapers, heard Geller on a local radio station asking people to get their broken watches working via his powers. The wife of the couple had an old battery-operated Sekonda, which had stopped, she estimates, over two years earlier. For amusement, she tried to give the watch the Geller treatment by clenching her hand over it and shouting, 'Work!'. Not only did it come to life, she says, but it started to tell the same time as the kitchen, microwave and oven clocks - all of which had been accidentally set two minutes fast a couple of days previously. Furthermore, a month later, the watch was still working perfectly.

'I am completely astounded by it, because I am a total sceptic. I still can't believe that it happened,' the woman told me. Her husband added: 'We always thought he was a charlatan, and in a way, we still do. We are both quite rational and deeply sceptical, but then we are also both religious people, who believe in the possibility of miracles. I have to dismiss as unbelievable the "obvious" explanation, that my wife got the watch going and set it by the kitchen clock and then played a trick on me. It is logical and plausible, but incorrect.'

Not all such people can, surely be imagining things? James Randi, a charismatic Canadian magician-turned-crusader against all forms of what he believes to be charlatanism, laughs and says they most certainly can. He claims he went on a New York radio station once pretending to be a Geller-esque spoon bending psychic, and similarly received scores of calls from people reporting healed watches and destroyed cutlery. Randi, who has spent 25 years and become world famous doggedly campaigning against Uri Geller, is a colourful engaging character, a former escapologist, who has been adopted as the unlikely figurehead of a coalition of anti-Geller magicians and scientists.

The possibilities of Randi's radio experiment are intriguing, so long as he is telling the truth. Unfortunately, Randi is a self-proclaimed conman; although he now describes himself as such ironically, to demonstrate that all magic is a confidence trick, he also has a self-defeating tendency to stretch the truth, albeit in the pursuit of what he believes to be a greater truth. Randi naturally subscribes to the view that the callers to the New York radio station imagined the phenomena, or were simply lying. But what if, believing that he was a 'real' psychic, they accepted a hypnotic suggestion that their spoons would bend and their watches re-start, and they thereupon triggered themselves whatever the Geller effect on metal is? Or if, under the power of Randi's suggestion, they all believed they had seen such phenomena, even though they had not occurred?

Of course, being told even by the steadiest and most reliable of witnesses such as Capt. Peleg, about such wonders as objects bending and changing at a distance, is fascinating, but not nearly so much so as seeing the phenomena for yourself; and many similar events happened to me after meeting Geller. An hour before I left my office on the morning of our very first interview in 1996, he phoned to ask if I minded conducting it as he went on one of his marathon Thames-side walks - the pattern we then settled into for two years. This meant I would have to use a remote microphone for my tape recorder, to clip onto Geller's lapel as we walked. In 1981, I had bought an excellent and expensive little Sony electronic mike with a tiny windsock which would have been ideal for an outdoor interview, but unfortunately it had not worked for at least ten years. For some reason, I had never thrown it away, occasionally buying a new battery for it to try to goad it back into life, but to no avail. It was completely dead. So when Geller said we would be doing the interview on the hoof, I went to my local electronics shops to quickly buy a new microphone, only to find that such things are unknown in suburban high streets. Back in my office, I found in a drawer one very cheap old mike I could use for the meanwhile. Next to it was the 15 year-old Sony; out of curiosity, I tried it out, and was alarmed to find it working perfectly. It has continued do so ever since, right through all the Geller interviews, indoors and out, all over the world, in all weathers.

I seem to have a thing about elderly gadgets; perhaps I had been awaiting Uri Geller all these years as a psychic repairman. Another, an old camera from the sixties, also underwent a mysterious rebirth during the course of writing the book. I use the second-hand Pentax Spotmatic with a close-up lens for copying pictures for my books. The meter has, again, not worked for several years, but this hardly matters, as I have had to become adept at judging exposure. One morning, I was on Kibbutz Hatzor, where Uri spent an unhappy year aged 11, when Nurit Melamed, the elder sister of his best friend from that time, Eytan Shomron, produced a tiny but excellent black and white snapshot of Uri and the Shomron family in about 1957. Nurit did not want to part with the photo, but was happy for me to copy it. The light level in her house was very low, however, so we took it outside, where the midday sun was dazzlingly bright. I realised I had never copied a photo in such light, and was unsure what exposure to use. For once, I could have done with a working meter. Peering through the viewfinder at Uri's intense eyes from 40 years ago, I suppose I should have expected something odd to happen, but I didn't, and proceeded to guess a variety of exposures. It was while doing so that I noticed the dead meter needle was suddenly working; I had no memory of ever seeing it move from its resting point. It gave me a perfect (and slightly unexpected reading) and continued to work for the rest of the day. The following morning, I awoke in my hotel to find a sandstorm had blown up, and I jumped up to take a photo through the window of the extraordinary swirling yellow dust outside. As I picked the camera up, the strap caught round something, and the camera hurtled to the hard floor with a horrible crack. The Pentax was undamaged, and still worked - all apart from the meter which stopped working again, and has not done so since.

A key element of these phenomena, if such they are, and not just coincidence upon coincidence, always seems to be an element of the unconscious. It is no use hoping or assuming your camera or microphone will suddenly work because what you are using it for connects in some way with Uri Geller. But if you aren't expecting it, something odd does seem to happen, even though. again and again, you curiously don't connect it with Geller when it does so. When I was copying the photo on the kibbutz, and told Nurit my camera meter had just come to life when I needed it, it was she who pointed out the Geller connection; I was concentrating so hard on the problem of taking the tricky photo, that for a moment, I genuinely did not know what she was referring to. Another day, Uri came to see me in my office, as he was passing by in the late afternoon. The next morning, a previously reliable wall clock he was sitting under was 20 minutes slow. Assuming the battery had run down, I checked it on a tester, but it was fresh. I threw the clock out that day. Perhaps I was a little slow too, bit it was only several hours later that the connection even struck me between the world's most renowned psychic interferer with watches sitting in my office and the five year-old clock packing up.

While they would obviously dismiss the idea that Geller can hypnotise us to make Geller-type effects happen through our own subconscious efforts, one or two of the professional magicians I interviewed hinted that when we saw our spoon bend so dramatically, it was an illusion as the result of a suggestion by Geller. Mass hypnotism does occasionally crop up as an explanation for such anomalies. In 1863, D.D. Home, a Scottish psychic who was never discovered to be a fraud, performed a series of table and cloth levitations in France, as well as extending his own body by six inches, and placing his head in a pile of live coals and emerging unmarked. The experiments and others by home were observed and written up by Sir William Crookes, a distinguished physicist, and Lord Adare, a Daily Telegraph foreign correspondent. A commentator in the scientific journal Nature at the time posited the theory that Home was a hypnotist. (His second possibility was that he was a werewolf.) In London over a hundred years later, the science fiction novelist Arthur C. Clarke, years after seeing his door key apparently bend under Uri Geller's gaze, changed his mind and said that he had been mistaken, and might have been in a hypnotic state when he made the observation.

But even having suspected that hypnotism might provide some kind of answer to the Geller enigma, learning later from Uri that Andrija Puharich was a master hypnotist came as something of a shock; and when I came by chance upon the first evidence that Uri himself had also quietly been honing his hypnotic skills back at least as far as the early seventies, I experienced what felt at the time like a falling of scales from the eyes. Uri subsequently mentioned hypnotism passingly in interview, but certainly does not dwell on the subject. This could merely be because it is not very important to him, but I did find myself wondering if this was an issue he preferred not to be too well-known.

Although it later turned out to be quite widely remembered in Israel, I found out about Uri's dalliance with hypnotism through an Israeli investment management MSc, Yael Azulay, whom I met at an afternoon workshop Geller held at Battersea Town Hall in London. Yael got up to tell Uri at the workshop that she met him in 1972, when she was a schoolgirl. He was very friendly towards her, but I do not think it was in his plans for me to take her number and go to see her months later. Yael is a great admirer of Uri Geller, but her story was quite different from what I expected.
Although by the time Yael Azulay met him, Uri was already famous, and well into his bizarre Puharich period, he was still attending showing his face all over Israel, even attending the more up-market type of student party in his continuing effort to convince the next generation of influential Israelis of his powers. Yael was at an elite private high school, where she was worried about some coming maths exams. She was at a friend of a friend's party late one night at a villa in a smart Tel Aviv area, when, she recalls, 'Uri just arrived. I remember someone saying he is likely to come and you must see this guy.'

'People were hyping him up and talking about how he does all these magic kinds of things. He just arrived and the music stopped and he was trying to grab attention because obviously he had an audience. He wanted to talk to us, to get something going. It's not unusual at Israeli parties if somebody wants to say something or they have had enough of the music just to come in and do as they want. Uri had short hair, and was wearing a loose baggy, checked shirt with buttons down the front and denims. He looked like a kibbutznik. He didn't come across as a very powerful man. He had presence, yes, but he was just like someone who was playing around. He said, "Does everyone want to do some hypnotism?", in a very inquisitive, almost childlike, way. Obviously I volunteered. I wasn't working at all at school, and I was worried about it. He had a pendulum, and said, "I bet you that with this pendulum, I can have you asleep within seconds." It seemed to me throughout the whole time he was hypnotising me, I was not asleep. I am quite aware of what was going on. Everybody was watching. He asked me if I wanted anything in particular and I said, yes I wanted him to make me pass my exams the next month, to make it so I could get really good mark in maths. I was very sceptical of the whole thing. I didn't believe that he had managed to hypnotise me, but I did immediately start working damned hard. And I don't know how, but the exact questions I had revised came up in the exam, and I got a really good mark of 95 per cent. Of course I made the connection when I got the mark. What I liked was that he didn't make me do anything under hypnosis. He inserted messages in my mind; he said, "Just believe that you are going to do well", but he wasn't looking for a product there and then. He didn't even ask me to let him know what results I got.'

If his hypnotic exploits are really a skeleton in Uri Geller's cupboard, and not merely just another ability he has, it may seem curious that Geller's sceptical critics have not made more of it in all the decades of ceaseless attacks on their bete noire. Insisting, as they do, that Geller simply bends spoons behind his back while you are not looking, is less than satisfactory for those who, even when they are aware of such moves and are on the look out for them, fail to see anything of the sort. Hypnotism would seem to be an acceptable, rational explanation for what so many people see, or believe they see, in his presence, or with him consciously or subconsciously in mind.

The problem for sceptics here is that, by and large, they believe hypnotism too is a fraud, and therefore obviously cannot cite it as a rational explanation for Uri Geller's repertoire. They argue that research with thousands of subjects has shown reliably that only 15 to 20 per cent of the entire population is capable of going into a deep hypnotic trance, and that only another 30 per cent can be hypnotised at a lighter level. Additionally, they say, we don't even really know what a trance is. No instrument has ever been invented to measure whether somebody is under hypnosis or not, and there is a good reason for this; there is no indication that there would be anything for such a machine to measure. Some modern brain scanning experiments have indicated that the brain activity of a hypnotised person is significantly different from that of a person told to pretend to be hypnotised. But the evidence is tentative. Other psychologists can show that the 'altered state' supposed to be characteristic of hypnosis can be faked. So much for the kind of controlled, laboratory tests which sceptical, empirical science demands before any new effect can be accepted as proven. Hypnosis happens when all parties to it willingly consent, and this does not make it a very scientific phenomenon.

'I am convinced,' James Randi told me in his Fort Lauderdale office, 'That hypnotism is an agreement between the hypnotist and the subject to fantasise. I have never seen anything done during a so-called hypnotic trance that could not be done out of a hypnotic trance.' At his office desk in Loughton, Essex, Mike Hutchinson, a close friend of Randi and a leading light in the British sceptic movement (as well as an implacable opponent of Uri Geller, like Randi) was still more forthright. 'Hypnosis is nonsense,' says Hutchinson, who left his job as a wood veneer merchant a decade ago to become the UK distributor for rationalist books from America. 'Let's get one thing straight as far as hypnosis is concerned - there is no such thing. There is no hypnotic trance. Perhaps if you use the word suggestion, I can go along with it. I know somebody who is a stage hypnotist, who used to use this so-called trance, but now he does his act without using the hypnotic trance - and gets the same sort of results.'

Randi went as far in 1995 as to include hypnosis in a book called The Supernatural A-Z. The practice did not emerge at all well under his scrutiny. Such apparent successes of hypnotism as weight-loss and cessation of smoking, he wrote, might just as easily be attained by religious inspiration, 'or the intervention of another mystic-sounding but ineffective therapy ... This is an idea professional hypnotists do not care to hear.'

Randi's is not the only supernatural bestiary to include hypnotism. Morris Goran's 1978 book, Fact, Fraud, and Fantasy, The Occult and Pseudosciences is a recommended text for convinced sceptics. In it, Goran lists hypnotism along with the likes of Pyramidology, Palmistry, Numerology, I Ching, Tarot Cards, Scientology, Witchcraft and Astrology. A 1990 book James Randi especially recommends, They Call It Hypnosis, by a psychologist, Robert Allen Baker, propounds the theory that there is no such thing as a state of altered consciousness produced by hypnosis, and that what we term hypnosis is in fact a mixture of social compliance, relaxation, and suggestibility. This, it is argued, can account for many occult phenomena, such as past-life regression, UFO 'abduction', channelling, and speaking in tongues. Another book, Bizarre Beliefs, by Simon Hoggart (a fine political journalist) and Mike Hutchinson, examines hypnotism alongside crop circles, Nostradamus, 'evidence' of a living Elvis Presley and the Curse of Tutankhamun. (An oddity to note here, perhaps, while mentioning Bizarre Beliefs, is that Mike Hutchinson's ex-wife was a white witch. I suggested light heartedly when he brought this slightly surprising point up in our interview that, with him a highly knowledgeable rationalist and campaigner against Geller, while his wife getting involved in witchcraft, the reason for her becoming his ex-wife was clearer than in most divorce cases. He shot a meaningful glance; 'It was better than if she'd got into Catholicism,' he said. It turned out that Hutchinson supported her, was delighted when she got into a good coven in nearby Leyton, and has written in qualified support of witchcraft [the white variety, at least] in a sceptics' magazine.)

To appreciate hypnotism's status for sceptics, it is important to realise that when this strange new mental process was discovered only 200 years ago, it was the spoon bending of its day, and its inventor, a Swiss-German mystic and physician, Franz Anton Mesmer, was in many ways the Uri Geller of the age. The striking parallels between Mesmer and Geller were, in fact, one of the most interesting unexpected discoveries I made during researching this book.

Mesmer was the talented son of a game warden, and was flamboyant, rather opinionated, forceful and given to the dramatic. At 23, as a medical student, he came up with his early ideas on hypnotism. He first called his practice 'animal gravitation', then changed its name to 'animal magnetism', magnetism being a particularly fashionable concept at the time as an explanation for, as we would say today, life, the universe and everything. For centuries, magnetism had been regarded as an 'occult virtue' and accredited with all manner of crazy qualities; once it was better understood, from the early 17th century, people liked to use magnetic attraction as a metaphor for all kinds of effects which had nothing to do with magnets. For Mesmer to tack 'magnetism' onto his theory was, then, much like attaching the prefix 'cyber' to some new concept today.

When Mesmer hypnotised patients, to produce 'crises' - what we would call trance - to cure various ailments, he used a combination of dozens of magnets and his own charisma. It hardly mattered that nor that the magnets were a completely extraneous gimmick. Not even Mesmer himself seemed to be aware that it was actually him - 'the magnetiser' - who was the significant ingredient in animal magnetism. Nor was it realised that the practice of curing ailments, both physical and mental, by unleashing the power of the subconscious had been used by shamans, medicine men and witchdoctors for thousands of years.
Mesmer was the man of the moment from shortly after setting up in medical practice in Vienna. In that city and in Munich, he demonstrated the art of 'magnetism', and was a sensation, with hundreds of happy clients to swear by his cures. Not surprisingly, Mesmer, a tempestuous maestro much given to tantrums, eventually attracted professional scepticism and outright opposition, just as Geller did centuries later. At the age of 43, in the wake of a slightly over-ambitious -and unsuccessful - attempt to cure a Viennese worthy of blindness, he decamped for Paris, and became a controversial sensation all over again, only this time in a much bigger way.
He opened a clinic on the Place Vendome, which he equipped with a baquet - a tub of water filled iron filings and pieces of glass and with iron rods protruding. Patients were required to grasp these rods while sitting in a circle connected by a cord. The room was darkened and full of mirrors; Mesmer would appear dressed as a wizard, touching or simply staring at his clients as soft music played. Some would fall asleep, others go into convulsions. And hundreds of these wealthy patients would claim to be cured. Such a furore ensued that Mesmer soon had to move into bigger premises, with four baquets, no waiting. He even introduced an economy class for those unable to afford the personal attention of the master. He 'magnetized' a tree, to which thousands of the poor and sick attached themselves with cords - shades of Uri Geller's power crystals. A large proportion of those who used the magnetized tree claimed to be cured, probably by self-hypnosis.
Le magnetisme animal was the talk of France, ridiculed by doctors, respectable scientists and satirists, discussed in hundreds of books and pamphlets, but patronised by the wealthy and powerful (Marie Antoinette for one) as well as the poor. Mesmer, as a man of science as well as a doctor, craved scientific validation, but the professors refused to discuss him, let alone investigate his claims. He and his preposterous theory were a gigantic hoax, they held. The Royal Society of Medicine discussed looking into Mesmer's methods, but he soon blew up over the suggested experimental protocols, and the Society would have nothing more to do with him.
The accusations of fraud did nothing whatever to dim Mesmer's star. The richer and more famous he became, the more miraculous cures were reported. Eventually, in 1784, the King, Louis XVI, intervened. He appointed a royal commission to establish whether Mesmer was a charlatan or a healer. On the panel were Lavoisier, the celebrated chemist, Benjamin Franklin, physicist and statesman, Bailly, the astronomer, Guillotin, inventor of the guillotine (seen at the time as a great advance in humane execution) and de Jussieu, a botanist.
The commission utterly debunked Mesmer. It ripped apart the concept of animal magnetism, found the fluid in the baquets was not magnetic at all, and showed that a susceptible subject, when offered four trees, only one of which was 'magnetized' was sent into a trance by all of them. It refused to consider the evidence that a huge number of people believed themselves cured by Mesmer, and effectively sent him packing into obscurity and exile. Of the nine commission members, only the botanist, du Jussieu, published a dissenting opinion. He was convinced from what he had seen that Mesmer might be on to something big and genuine.
A combination of Mesmer's rampant commercialism, his showbizzy pzazz, his fanaticism and the poor standard of his scientific explanation for his own work ensured that he was designated a hoax and a fraud. Yet a large body of his more open-minded supporters believed - rightly as it turned out - that Mesmer was on the track of something, and they continued to use and develop animal magnetism, still without knowing what it really was.
Sceptics aside, today, hypnosis is pretty much an established treatment, 'Officially endorsed,' as the Encyclopaedia Britannica confirms, 'as a therapeutic method by medical, psychiatric, dental, and psychological associations throughout the world.' Some hypnotists in Europe still describe the 'community of sensation' between hypnotist and subject, likening it to a magnetic force. Experiments by Soviet researchers have suggested that hypnotism can work over very long distances, of a thousand miles, in one case, and that hypnotic suggestion may even be able to be transmitted by some electromagnetic means. In more conventional arenas, hypnotism is used in preparing people for anaesthesia and childbirth, in enhancing drug response, and reducing dosages. Hypnosis is routinely used in the management of extreme pain, especially in cases of terminal cancer. It is excellent for nervous dental patients, and works well on high blood pressure and headaches. Although Freud used hypnosis for a while, he turned against it. Partly as a consequence of this, in modern psychotherapy, it is not fully approved of, because of the argument that it relieves only symptoms and not the causes of neurosis. Although controversy continues to burn on over the question of stage hypnotists, and whether their performances or dangerous or even fraudulent, few medical doctors, and still fewer practitioners in the psychological sciences, have any doubt at all that hypnotism is 'real'.

Real, yes, but could it have caused a sceptical journalist and his two teenaged children to believe simultaneously that they had seen the same spoon bend when it hadn't? That depended, I found, who you asked. For Mike Hutchinson, the idea was not conceivable - not that he was in any way suggesting the spoon bending we saw was real. 'A mass hypnosis, of three people?' Hutchinson reflected. 'Suggestion, perhaps, but if you are thinking about being put into trance, then no.'

What did Paul McKenna think? On the phone from New York, where he is establishing himself as a star of stage hypnosis as he has been in the UK for many years, McKenna took an on-the-fence position, but not an uninteresting one. 'Three people to see the same thing? Definitely, I think it's possible, if the operator is skilful and slick enough,' he said. 'There are all kinds of examples of mass hallucinations. It's less common than one person seeing something.

Could Geller have learned to hypnotise the unsuspecting in an instant, as McKenna seem to. 'It seems in my stage show to some people that I have more power than I really do,' McKenna admitted. 'It looks as if I can just walk up and snap my fingers, but that's not actually what takes place at all. Because of the environment, the context in which the show is taking place, the cards are so stacked in my favour that I appear to be able to do these things. Some research in Australia has shown that if you give people a big title, like professor, doctor or his lordship, they appear to be taller to people than if they don't. We distort reality in our mind with our preconceptions. But at the same time, on anecdotal evidence of spoon bending, I'd say I'd have to keep an open mind. I've seen magicians bend spoons, and fool me, but not the way Uri does it, where people see it bend apparently by itself. So what you saw could have been real.'
Dr. Graham Wagstaff, Reader in Psychology at Liverpool University and a leading authority on hypnosis had a third view. It was Wagstaff who gave evidence in Paul McKenna's favour at the court case in London in July 1998 of a man who believed Paul McKenna had turned him into a schizophrenic and tried to sue the hypnotist.
'It wouldn't be unusual for three people to think that's what they've all seen if that's what they expected to see,' Wagstaff postulated. 'Or maybe you did see it, but it was an illusion, or maybe it's a problem of memory, that you all remembered it wrongly. But as for hypnosis by Uri Geller, you'd have to have a pretty way out, eccentric view of hypnosis to believe people can be hypnotised without being aware of it. It won't wash with the vast majority of the scientific hypnosis community, even those who really believe there is a hypnotic state. To them, a hypnotic state is something like focusing your attention, not some weird thing, some strange suggestible state that you fall into and then you're in it. You have to believe you're being hypnotised.'
In talking to Graham Wagstaff, a fascinating difference between him, a professional sceptic, and myself, who I would have to class as an amateur, became clear to me. He believes that we all have stories the likes of which Geller, Puharich (and latterly, me) would regard as 'strange' and spooky, but that a proper sceptic retains his scepticism at pretty much all costs.
'We all have these experiences,' Wagstaff told me. 'One of my favourites was when the wing mirror on my car got mended by itself. It was in about 1975, when I lived in Newcastle, and, no, I wasn't on drugs. I had a Ford Anglia, and the mirror was dangling off. Then one morning, I came along and it wasn't dangling off. It was mended. That's how I remember it. I do a bit on cars, and I'd looked at it, and I couldn't see how anyone could fix it. I'm not suggesting that anything weird and wonderful happened, but that I suppose, I must have seen it wrong, or I'd made some sort of mistake, or my memory was playing tricks on me or something like that. I went through everything, None of the neighbours knew what had happened. I was quite worried about it. It's quite possible that some good Samaritan mended it, but I would have thought it was beyond repair. It was hanging down.. But I'm a real sceptic, so there must be some explanation.