Some communications begin with great emotion.

Others begin with the smell of Spam.

Looking back at this moment from Tony Stockwell Live, I am reminded that mediumship can be moving, evidential and wonderfully funny, sometimes all within the same communication.

In this reading, a gentleman named Walter first steps forward. He brings with him a tiny kitchen, a rather solitary nature and that strangely particular smell of Spam.

But before long, Walter moves aside and a grandmother makes her presence very firmly known.

What follows is a warm and revealing communication involving tea leaves, a difficult period four years earlier, a child who wore a caliper and, most significantly, a ruby ring whose story only becomes fully clear afterwards. 

Walter and the tiny kitchen

The communication begins when I hear the name Walter very clearly.

I become aware of an older gentleman, somewhere in his early to mid-seventies when he passed. He has grey hair, light-coloured eyes and a rather willowy appearance.

He takes me into his home, and particularly into his kitchen.

It feels tiny.

A small space that seems to have become the centre of his life, especially after his wife had passed and he had been left living alone.

There is also a sense that Walter could be somewhat difficult to get close to. Perhaps not deliberately unkind, but a man who found that other people rather got on his nerves. He allowed those he loved into his world, but did not necessarily have much patience for everybody else.

And then comes the smell.

Spam.

I cannot explain why a spirit should present himself through the smell of Spam, but that is what I experience. There is something rather stale and enclosed about the little kitchen, as though the house might have benefited from opening a few windows.

The lady in the audience recognises him.

Walter was the uncle of her former husband. After her husband lost his mother when he was young, Walter and his wife had brought him up.

She also remembers Walter’s kitchen.

It was indeed very small.

This is one of the things I enjoy about mediumship. A communication does not always arrive wrapped in solemnity. Sometimes personality comes forward through humour, through a familiar room or even through the slightly questionable aroma of someone’s cooking.

Walter had made himself known.

But apparently, he was not the only person waiting.

When Nana barges in

As Walter begins to move aside, I feel a grandmother stepping into his place.

In fact, “stepping in” may be putting it too politely.

She seems to barge him out of the way.

Immediately, she shows me a teacup and saucer with tea leaves gathered at the bottom. She gives me the feeling that she would read those leaves and tell someone their fortune.

The lady knows exactly what this means.

Her grandmother read tea leaves.

There is a lovely confidence about Nana as she comes forward. She knows that this one image should be enough for her granddaughter to identify her.

But she does not stop there.

She also gives me the feeling that her granddaughter has inherited something of this ability herself, although Nana feels she worked rather harder at it.

There is a gentle telling-off within the message.

Perhaps it is time for her granddaughter to put a little more effort into developing what she has been given.

In the interview afterwards, the lady explains just how meaningful this was.

She had joined a psychic development circle and, during one session, the group had worked with tea leaves. Although she did not understand why, she suddenly found that she could see all sorts of things within them.

Only later did she discover that her grandmother had read the leaves too.

Even more remarkably, before the demonstration that evening, her friends had been talking to her in the foyer about exactly this subject. They had been asking when she was going to read their tea leaves again.

Then Nana arrived and raised it herself.

For me, this is a beautiful example of how a communication can connect the past with the present.

A grandmother’s practice.

A granddaughter’s emerging ability.

A conversation held only a short time before the demonstration.

All brought together through one teacup.

Eva and looking after others

Nana then gives me a name that sounds like Eve, Eva or Ava.

The lady recognises Eva as a friend who is with her.

There is a simple instruction attached to the name: look after Eva and make sure she gets home safely.

It is said lightly, but there is also recognition that this lady is someone who tends to look after everybody.

That small moment gives us another glimpse of Nana’s character.

She is not only identifying herself through what she did in life. She is still taking an interest in the people around her granddaughter and in the way her granddaughter cares for others.

Four difficult years

The feeling of the communication then changes.

Nana asks her granddaughter to think back four years.

I become aware that this had been an extremely difficult period, one of the hardest times in her life. Although several years had passed, she was still recovering from what had happened.

The lady confirms this immediately.

In her interview afterwards, she explains that she had suffered a serious head injury. She had lost consciousness and doctors discovered a large blood clot on her brain.

She required surgery and was very unwell afterwards.

This was not information that the audience could have known simply by looking at her.

Yet Nana seemed to understand both the seriousness of what had happened and the long period of recovery that followed.

The feeling I receive is not one of continuing darkness, however.

It is lighter.

Freer.

There is recognition of what she has endured, but also a sense that she is now moving beyond the weight of those years.

Sometimes those in spirit do not come merely to describe the past.

They come to acknowledge how hard someone has fought to reach the present.

The ruby ring

The moment that gives this reading its title begins when Nana places a ring upon my finger.

It feels like a ruby ring, or perhaps a cluster of red stones.

I initially feel that this is a ring belonging to the grandmother which has been promised to her granddaughter but has not yet reached her.

The lady explains that her mother had recently died and had left her a ring.

I ask whether it definitely contains rubies.

She confirms that it does.

For a moment, it seems possible that I have confused the generations and that the ring belongs to her mother rather than her grandmother.

But Nana continues to give me the ruby ring.

The lady then remembers that there is another ruby ring, although she does not know where that one originated.

I ask her to look more closely, perhaps through old photographs or family memories, to discover whether the second ring belonged to her grandmother.

Only afterwards does the full significance become clear.

Following her mother’s death, the lady had received her jewellery box. Inside were two rings.

One was her mother’s ring, which contained diamonds.

The other was a plain ruby ring.

That ring had belonged to Nana.

It had been sitting quietly in her mother’s jewellery box, and she had almost forgotten that it existed.

The ring I had felt was not simply another piece of jewellery.

It was the grandmother’s ring.

A family object which had passed silently from one generation to another, waiting to be recognised.

That is why these details matter.

A ruby ring is not meaningful merely because it is valuable or beautiful.

It carries a person.

It has been worn on somebody’s hand.

It appears in photographs, family gatherings and memories.

It moves through generations, carrying its story with it.

And through the communication, Nana seems to say:

You have my ring.

You know which one I mean.

Remember me when you wear it.

“Built for comfort, not for speed”

As the communication continues, I become more aware of Nana’s physical presence and personality.

She presents herself as a larger lady, as I put it at the time, “built for comfort, not for speed”.

There is warmth around her, but she is also direct.

Her message is not complicated:

“Tell her I’m here. Tell her I’m watching her.”

That is enough for Nana.

She has identified herself through the leaves, commented on her granddaughter’s own development, acknowledged the difficult years and directed attention towards her ring.

But she has one more piece of family evidence to offer.

The child with the caliper

I become aware of a child connected to Nana and the family who had needed to wear a caliper on one leg.

The lady recognises this as her cousin, although she corrects me that the cousin was male rather than female.

The essential image, however, is understood.

There was a child in the family who wore a caliper, and Nana would certainly have known him.

As I experience the communication, it feels as though Nana is placing the caliper onto my own leg so that I can understand what she is showing me.

There is also a mischievous sense of humour around her.

She is not wicked, but she might say something wickedly funny about somebody and then laugh. She could tease the child about the way he walked, but it would be said with affection rather than cruelty.

Again, we are being shown character.

Not a solemn or perfected version of a grandmother, but the woman her family actually knew.

Warm.

Cheeky.

Blunt.

Loving.

And still very much herself.

Why this reading stays with me

What I enjoy about this communication is the way it moves so naturally between humour, evidence and emotion.

Walter arrives with his tiny kitchen and the smell of Spam.

Nana pushes him aside with her teacup and saucer.

She reminds her granddaughter of an inherited ability, acknowledges four difficult years, identifies a family caliper and draws attention to a ruby ring whose true history is confirmed afterwards.

Nothing about the reading feels distant or abstract.

It is full of ordinary life.

A small kitchen.

Tea shared around a table.

Friends discussing a tea-leaf reading in the foyer.

A piece of family jewellery resting inside a box.

A grandmother telling her granddaughter that she ought to work a little harder.

These are the things from which lives are made.

They are also the things through which people are so often recognised.

At the end of her interview, the lady says it is lovely to know that her grandmother is still around her, even if Nana has apparently returned partly to tell her off.

That, to me, is the heart of this reading.

Love does not always announce itself with a grand declaration.

Sometimes it smells faintly of Spam.

Sometimes it appears in the bottom of a teacup.

And sometimes it is waiting quietly inside a jewellery box, in the form of a plain ruby ring that once belonged to Nana.

Tony

A few moments of evidence from the reading

These are some of the personal details that came forward during the demonstration, together with the audience member’s later confirmations.