GW: Usually, I have some form of path for an interview but this one, the subject is such an open playing field I don’t know where to go so look at is a chat rather than a series of questions to be answered.

JM: Yeah great!

She Walks In Beauty

GW: You’ve already done your autobiography, why did you want to write this? Your spiritual journey.

JM: Well because it was such shock to me, a shock and a revelation that all these things were happening and I realised that her consciousness was still there, was carrying on. Then there is all the stuff in the bible, you know, judgement day and all this stuff. I don’t believe there is anything like that.

GW: I don’t believe that either. There’s no God, eternal damnation or anything like that but I am starting to believe there is something. Maybe something we haven’t thought of yet. In your book you wrote that a hundred years ago we couldn’t conceive of mobile phones and microwaves and I think that’s where we are now with afterlife.

JM: Yeah. Did you know that the University of Arizona, I think it is, is working on a phone whereby if you want to talk to one of your deceased relatives, you can talk to them on your phone? (laughs) They have everything set up, lots of advisors, mediums and psychics…even Albert Einstein is involved.

GW: Oh…is he? (laughs)

JM: Yes because there is a medium channelling him. (laughs) There are some incredible things going on.

GW: Speaking of mediums and referring to a few people you mention in your book, Sir Arthur Conan-Doyle was taken in by them, Houdini wasn’t but you also mention Doris Stokes…

JM: Yeah.

GW: I have a theory about Doris Stokes: she was highly telepathic and didn’t realise it. It did come to light later on that she planted people in the audience sometimes but nevertheless, there are two thousand other people that went to her shows that want to connect. Maybe their vibes were so strong that she just picked up on them without realising it, believing they were coming from the other side. 

JM: Yeah that’s possible. That would make her a psychic rather than a medium. Suzanne Giesmann* who I follow a lot, she talks about that. With me, I’m convinced because of all the personal stuff that happened to me when no one else was around and it still carries on. The things that happen are so personal and I was convinced enough to get on the phone to Dave Thompson to ask him to do the book and was surprised when he wanted to do it.

GW: You get through quite a lot in the book. It’s not just afterlife but other unexplained phenomena. You mentioned you went into a crop circle for example. Those are another fascination of mine.

JM: It was near Stonehenge. There was a sort of an energy there, a calmness. It was pouring with rain and the corn was soaked and we were soaked but even then there was something comical. We went into a pub after that and it was the flying saucer pub. (laughs) It was the place where they all get together and talk about it because they see them all over the place.

GW: That’s more the route I went as a kid. Erich von Däniken and Ancient Aliens and Dr Lyall Watson’s book Supernature which you also mention.

JM: Have you seen the Fantastic Fungi?

GW: No. What is it?

JM: It’s about all the fungi under the earth. There is a whole network of fungi that are controlling everything. Recycling things, dead animals and restoring the earth. It’s amazing.

Jim and Lizzie and Glenn and Hiroko

GW: So, like you, I was fascinated by the paranormal when I was a kid and still have a healthy interest in it today. Also, like you, I met Hiroko late on in life and she also died of cancer – we only had ten years together. The difference comes though in that I don’t believe in the afterlife so we never talked about it. What did you and Lizzie both believe and when her condition got to the point that you both knew the end was coming, did you ever talk about the connection, the threads as you put it, between here and the afterlife?

JM: We did believe in the afterlife but we didn’t talk about it much. We sort of thought there must be one but we didn’t spend much time on it. We got involved in Buddhism as you know, we studied it but it’s all very theoretical and then suddenly, when she died, it was in my face and I thought hang on, she’s got to be around somewhere. She was such a big energy and we were so close and then I heard that story from the woman that saw her she died and that led me on. I got into the near-death experiences and all that. They all seem to have a very common theme.

GW: So where are you now? You seem to be at peace and have some kind of solace.

JM: Yes. The fact that she was gone and then remembering all the terrible suffering. We went to Paris and stayed there while she had chemotherapy and then at the end she went down very quickly in a few months – that was very painful. I think the fact that I feel that I can communicate with her, takes that away, the pain of remembering and I can think, she’s ok, she’s not in pain anymore.

GW: What makes you so certain that the magpie dancing on the chimney stack was not just a magpie doing something that you’ve never seen a magpie do before? †

JM: I don’t know. It was something unusual, something out of the ordinary. When she was still alive but in a coma, there were a bird trying to get in the window and I was talking to her, telling her there was a bird pecking at the window, trying to get in. I had never seen anything like that before and apparently it was her. A medium told me that she could go out of her body and merge with the birds! (laughs) Other things happen that were very light like moving the oven clock forward twelve hours or turning the TV off really comical things and I had one just the other day. The day before yesterday, I was listening to some music she would have liked, tuning into her energy as I do and I spoke to her saying ‘Give me a sign or something’ and the word ‘Cowboy’ came into my mind. Now, I tend to scroll through Facebook quite a bit and I was scrolling on and suddenly there was a picture of about twenty cowboys all standing outside a saloon (laughs). It’s funny things like that, an evidential thing.

GW: You are experiencing this more than me and as I mentioned earlier, I don’t believe in the afterlife but there have been a couple of moments I can’t explain. I have a story which is akin to your Liverpool football match experience. †

JM: Oh yeah! Go on.

GW: Well, Hiroko loved England and a couple of months before she died she surprised me by saying she wanted her ashes scattering off the Strait of Dover. A few months later, I took her ashes to England, chartered a boat and went out into the English Channel. The pilot of the boat asked me where I wanted to scatter them and I said ‘I don’t know, just go and I’ll know the spot when I see it’. So off we set and after a while I saw this spot where the white cliffs where radiant and there was a little dip where you could see the green of England and I said ‘This is it’. Fast forward to a week ago and I’m at a bit of a loose end, walking around not doing much, feeling a bit unsettled and something just said ‘Put the TV on’ and I should say at this point, I don’t watch much TV so I don’t default to any channel or program I turn it on, scroll through the two thousand channels and leave it on one – I can’t even tell you which channel or what the program was – while I go to the fridge and get a beer.  It’s a Guiness, one of Hiroko’s favourite beers and I sat down. Lo and behold, as soon as I did, the scene changed and an airplane flew over that very spot.

JM: (laughs) That’s amazing! Don’t you love it though?

GW: I do. If it wasn’t her, it’s an astonishing coincidence.

JM: (still laughing) I know I know! Well, it’s not a coincidence, is it?

GW: I’d like to think not but then I have to start believing in the afterlife.

JM: That’s the thing. What happens is the other part of your mind is arguing with you and it happens to me as well. I was staying up in the hills for a few days, a quiet place that we used to go and I went on a walk. I said to Lizzie, ‘Tell me what I’m going to see’ and she replied I was going to see these pink flowers. I thought ‘There’s no flowers there’ because it’s a really rough sort of mountainy landscape and I walked and walked and there was nothing, just thistles and things. Then she said ‘Walk to where the grass grows over the path’ which was about another half a mile off and there, out of the blue were these pink snapdragons, not one other flower anywhere! (laughs). I’m stood there, looking at them thinking ‘This is not true’, arguing in my mind. (laughs)

GW: I can’t explain that. My other moment happened recently and is a mathematical improbability…

JM: Oh yeah…please.

GW: Hiroko died on June 10th and her birthday was June 17th so I hosted a lunch for her with her closest friends. I knew the lunch would go on a bit and I have a box set of 1960s CDs that I bought here which as some stuff you’d know but also some 1960s Japanese hits – there’s about twenty discs. Anyway, I decided, I’d just randomly throw these discs on as background music as we ate and drank and sometimes the disc would finish and I’d change it straight away and other times I wouldn’t notice and could have been twenty minutes before I put another one on. We began at 2pm and at 6:50pm I stopped everybody for a toast and told the story of me and her son going to the hospital for her last moment on the last day. She died at 7pm and just as I finished telling the story, at the same time she died, Dusty Springfield hit that big note at the end of You Don’t Have To Say You Love Me, “Believe meeeeeee” which just happens to be mine and hers favourite recording.

JM: (laughs hysterically)

GW: I’ve been through the permutations of that time and time again. I don’t even know which disc that song is on let alone how I could have possibly timed whatever it was I played before to coincided with that split second.

JM: (Still laughing hysterically) A fantastic story! Explain it how you want to but these things happen. I’ve studied this quite a lot now and there seems to be no sense of time. They are not in linear time and they can make these things happen. The thing is, with all these things is you have to be open to them. If you are not, you won’t notice them.

GW: Jim, thank you for doing this. I hope you can get over here again soon. Let’s have dinner and while away hours on all this stuff.

JM: I’d like that. Thanks Glenn.

At one point in the interview, Jim asked me if his book helped me in some way and I replied that it did - I got a lot of comfort from it. I would like to add that so did having this chat and again when I typed it up. Thank you, Jim.

* https://suzannegiesemann.com/

† You need to read the book