Lunching with a psychic, whose business it is to get inside your mind, does not bode well for a relaxed eating experience. But when Claire Graham, one of the SAR's most prolific head-examiners, turned up at Indochine 1929, she declared, 'I'm really nervous, I don't do these things easily.' Yet surely she had already run through the whole meal, even read my review? 'I can turn the voices down,' she said. 'I've learned to pace myself and have breaks, tune out. You'd go mad if you didn't. I used to get burned out just like everyone else who overworks.' She has certainly been doing that for the past few years. A childhood interest in the spirits has taken her around the world, with clients lined up everywhere from Miami to London.
She is also a 29-year-old mother to Beatrice, seven - who introduces her as 'my mum, the psycho' - has a house in Clearwater Bay and a fiance on Jardine's Lookout, and holds consultations six days a week at The New Age Shop in Old Bailey Street. And she is constantly being interviewed.
So were her guides standing shotgun at the table with us? The restaurant was only a third full so there was plenty of room to pull up a few chairs. 'They're always with me. Everyone has their guides,' she said. But they seemed to be absent as we wavered over our choices. We finally decided to share dishes and ordered starters of vegetable spring rolls ($34 for three), and barbecued king prawns with a garlicky sauce ($88 for two).
Indochine is well known for importing many of its ingredients and herbs from Vietnam. It makes for a memorable assault on the senses. Graham is a regular.
She is not everyone's idea of what a psychic looks like. Blonde and imposing although she is on an equally imposing diet and exercise regime prior to her marriage to a wine merchant, she is dressed in a grey jacket that she admits cheerfully is from the Macau Ferry Terminal and cost nothing at all, like much of the bargain-hunting she loves.
It is a refreshing approach from someone who earns $1,000 for a one-hour reading and does six to seven a day. Banish thoughts of an odd, unsettling personality: Graham is down-to-earth.