Free The Pen Friend by Ciaran Carson Page A

taped up in layers of kitchen roll inserted into plastic tubing which is then enclosed in a Jiffy bag, or enclosed in a pen-sized box surrounded by a cushion of polystyrene beans within a much larger box secured by layers of parcel tape that make access sometimes endearingly difficult, accompanied by handwritten notes, Hi, Gabriel, hope you enjoy the pen, have left you good feedback, hope you do the same for me, warm regards , and here the seller would sign themselves by their given name, Paul, Mary, George, whatever, to show that there was a human being behind their adopted eBay user ID s, semi-humorous tags like wadatz9, pentopl, bjaune, livia4, leftyy, mcgrrkk, xklepper, mrknipl, dizmusch, from which one could form some mental picture of the person – bjaune I saw as a yellow-haired Frenchman, or Francophile, maybe he was called Bernard, livia4 had to be a buxom Irishwoman, Anna Livia, and mrknipl was a New York Jewish marriage broker, Mr Knipl – while others called themselves by impenetrable strings of letters and numerals, 56mxot99f, xh17mq555, pp97304, and from these I deduced either that they were nervous individuals, overly security-conscious, or were so secure in themselves that they did not feel the need to present an almost recognisable face to the virtual world.
    At any rate, the whole eBay system is based on mutual trust. You bid, you buy, you sell, and every one of these transactions receives Feedback, so that a cumulative profile of your honesty is built up which can be consulted by any other eBay member at any time. In this manner I have bought pens from people all over the world, from Kansas, Minnesota, Taiwan, Paris, Augsburg, York, Swanage, Brighton, Hamburg, Greece, New Zealand, Hong Kong, the Balearic Islands. You could say that eBay is a kind of Esperanto, or free-market communism, except its members are invisible.
    My own eBay ID is goligher. In the course of my Esperanto researches I had been following a tenuous link between Esperanto and spiritualism, and I’d taken the name from a spiritualist group known as the Goligher Circle, of Belfast, who between 1915 and 1920 were the subject of investigation by W.J. Crawford, a lecturer in Engineering at Queen’s University. The Circle was essentially a family affair. Mr Morrison, in the attic of whose home the Circle met, was a hard-working committee member of the Spiritualist Society. Mrs Morrison was a sister of the principal medium, Kathleen Goligher. The other participants were Mr Goligher, Kathleen’s father; Kathleen’s older sisters, Lily and Anna; and her younger brother Samuel, who was thought to have some mediumistic gifts. There is no mention of a Mrs Goligher. I first came across the case when I picked up Crawford’s book, The Reality of Psychic Phenomena (1916), in the Excelsior Book Store in Skipper Street. Over the next few months I managed to get my hands on the rest of Crawford’s oeuvre: Hints and Observations for Those Investigating the Phenomena of Spiritualism (1918), Experiments in Psychical Science (1919) and The Psychic Structures at the Goligher Circle , published posthumously in 1920. Crawford, after many painstaking experiments, concluded that Kathleen in particular was a medium of extraordinary power, and that the phenomena were genuine.
    As described by him, the séances which produced the phenomena differed little from those conducted all over Europe and America at the time, when spiritualism was re-energised by the grief of those who lost their loved ones in the Great War. The participants would enter an attic room, and form a circle around the séance table. The room would be illuminated by a dim red light, in this instance a gas jet ensconced in a lantern having a red glass sliding front, for normal light was thought to be injurious to the phenomena. The sitters, said Crawford, clasp each other’s hands in chain order, and the séance begins. One of the members of the circle begins the proceedings with a prayer, and