Most people simply call me Dusty. I began reading cards at about nine years old, in a world where the travelling fair was not a decorative idea but part of ordinary life. My father worked the grounds with his stalls, and through that travelling fraternity I grew up around people who understood that a reading was not a party trick. It was a craft.

My first lessons did not come from a manual. They came person to person. Romani practitioners and travellers known through those fairground circles taught me to read playing cards and introduced me to forms of traditional divination including tarot, palmistry and the crystal ball. What mattered was not memorising a paragraph for each card. It was learning to watch the whole spread, the person, the question, the atmosphere and the way one sign altered another.

I did not learn the craft by picking up a handful of books, completing a short online course or collecting meanings from videos. Those things can be useful introductions, but an introduction is not the same as a developed practice. My foundation came through direct teaching from people who already knew the work, whatever natural aptitude I brought to it, and then many years of practice, study, correction and refinement. Like any serious skill, reading becomes more reliable through use, feedback and judgement accumulated over time.

That distinction still matters to me. In Romani traditions, and in many other folk and cultural traditions of divination, the act of reading can carry real gravity. Questions are brought because something matters. The work is treated with respect because knowledge has been carried through families, communities and generations. Much of that tradecraft was oral and practical: shown, corrected and understood through use rather than reduced to a published formula. Some of what I was taught in that way is not material I have ever found reproduced in a book.

I was curious far beyond the cards. Divination led into questions about consciousness, spirits, folklore, religion, the supernatural and the occult. Over the years I sought out teachers, practitioners, researchers and traditions that could add another piece to the puzzle. Books and archives became part of that search, but they were never the whole of it. Some knowledge is academic. Some is practical. Some is esoteric: taught privately, demonstrated rather than published, and understood properly only through context and experience. I do not treat that as a badge of status. It simply explains why parts of my working method cannot be reduced to a list of textbook meanings or a downloadable formula.

Professionally, I later added a grounded framework around that older craft, including training to Master Practitioner level in NLP, Time Line Therapy, hypnotherapy and counselling-related work. Those disciplines are not offered here as therapy. They sit behind the Table as an additional framework for language, patterns, behaviour, context and responsible conversation.

I am also a trained psychic and spirit medium. That remains part of my background, but mediumship is not a standard service at Dusty at the Table at present. The decision is deliberate. My current work is concentrated on the living person sitting at the crossroads now: the relationship, choice, pressure, repeating pattern, loss of direction or practical problem that still has to be navigated in this life. Mediumship has its own purpose and sensitivity; this Table is presently devoted to helping people read the road they are still walking.

After all these years, Tarot de Marseille remains at the centre because it demands something from the reader. It does not hand over a complete illustrated story or tell you, scene by scene, what you are supposed to think. The reader has to create the meaning from the board: structure, number, suit, proportion, direction, repetition, proximity, visual tension, interaction and the exact question being asked. That requires creativity, but not free invention. The imagination has to be disciplined by the cards and by the situation in front of you.

Some tarot systems provide stronger pictorial cues and more readily taught narrative meanings. The Marseille gives less away. That is precisely why I value it. It makes the reader do more of the interpretive work rather than leaning on a pre-written script. A competent reading therefore depends less on reciting what a card is supposed to mean and more on seeing how meaning changes when the cards meet each other on the table.

That distinction is central to my approach. Knowing a list of card meanings is useful; it is not the same thing as knowing how to read. Reading well asks for pattern recognition, judgement, contextual sensitivity, imagination, restraint and the ability to communicate what you see without turning uncertainty into false certainty. Those abilities take time to develop.

Other tools remain available – playing cards, dominoes, runes, crystal work, scrying and oracle systems – but nothing is put on the Table merely to make it look mysterious.

The mystery is real enough without embellishment. My job is to keep one hand on that mystery and the other firmly on the road.