On Tuesday afternoon, a woman in a leopard-print coat and a black bob was seen sitting at a fold-up garden table outside the B&Q on Cricklewood Broadway. The table bore a hand-painted sign: ‘Clairvoyant. £10. No refunds.’ A queue of nine people formed, mostly men in their fifties holding bags of compost. The woman was Britney Spears. She told the first man, Gareth Llewellyn, 54, that he would meet a tall dark stranger in the plumbing aisle. Llewellyn later confirmed he did, a man called Steve from Enfield, who was looking for a washer. Spears refused to answer questions from a reporter, saying only: ‘You already know what I’m going to say. That’s the point.’

You have questions. Of course you do. You have been eating eggs, staring at screens and expecting the future to arrive in an orderly fashion, which is three errors before lunch. Sit down. No, further down. This week you will:

  • Walk briskly to Cricklewood, any entrance.
  • Reduce your egg intake to zero, then lower.
  • Accept that your kitchen will flood.
  • Apologise to your mother, who knows.

If the future remains unclear, that is your own fault. I can see you reading this. You are holding the page too close.

The management takes a dim view of unlicensed prophecy

Dale Pemberton, 47, the store manager, approached Spears at 3.15pm and asked her to leave. He cited a policy that prohibits ‘solicitation of any kind, including spiritual’. Pemberton explained that the garden centre had hosted ‘Psychic Sue’ on Saturdays for eleven years and that Sue had a licence, a gazebo and a loyalty card scheme. Spears looked at Pemberton for a long moment and said: ‘Your Vauxhall Corsa will fail its MOT on 14 November. The brake pipes. You’ll blame the garage.’ Pemberton laughed, then stopped laughing. He later checked his MOT expiry date. It was 13 November. He did not comment.

‘I have a duty of care to my customers, and that includes protecting them from unsolicited divination,’ said Pemberton, who declined to discuss the brake pipes further.

Three kitchens flood and the local paper gets involved

By Friday, three of Spears’s nine customers reported that their kitchens had flooded. One of them, Maureen Duckworth, 68, of Dollis Hill, said Spears had told her the flood would come ‘from under the sink, not the sky’. Duckworth’s insurance assessor has described the damage as ‘consistent with a slow leak over several weeks’, which Duckworth says proves nothing. The Cricklewood Gazette ran a piece headlined ‘The Cricklewood Prophecy’, in which a local historian compared Spears to Mother Shipton. Spears has since raised her price to £25 and added a second sign: ‘No questions about eggs.’

‘I never believed in this sort of thing, but now I have a wet carpet and a date for it,’ said Duckworth, who has since bought a dehumidifier and a small statue of St Expeditus, the patron saint of urgent causes.

The Gazette’s piece has sold 400 copies, its best since a 2019 report on a squirrel that learned to open a latch. The historian, Dr Miriam Stokes, said the comparison to Mother Shipton was ‘generous but not entirely without merit, particularly the part about the floods’.

A fixed penalty notice and a brief exchange with the council

On Thursday morning, Barnet council enforcement officer Kevin Rudd, 39, served Spears with a fixed penalty notice for trading without a street licence. Rudd said he was required to ask if she had anything to say. Spears said: ‘You’ll be back on Monday. Your mother’s leg.’ Rudd’s mother, 71, has a leg. Rudd declined to elaborate. The council has issued a statement saying it ‘takes all unauthorised trading seriously, regardless of the trader’s fame or claimed abilities’. It has not said whether it will pursue the £100 fine or accept a prediction of when it will be paid.

‘I don’t know what she meant, and I don’t want to know,’ said Rudd, who has since booked his mother in for a routine podiatry appointment, just in case.

Psychic Sue breaks her silence

Sue Tranter, 58, who has run the garden centre stall since 2015, said she was not threatened. ‘I don’t do floods,’ she said. ‘I do more general reassurance. People want to hear about a holiday, a new kitchen, a nice young man. Nobody wants to be told their brake pipes are going.’ Tranter added that she has never charged more than £15 and that her gazebo is fully insured. Asked whether she had considered a collaboration, Tranter said she had not, and that she works alone, ‘like all the best people’. She then asked the reporter to leave, as she had a customer waiting.

‘She’s welcome to the car park,’ said Tranter, adjusting her tarot cards. ‘But if she starts predicting loyalty card points, we’ll have words.’

Spears declines to clarify her terms and conditions

On Friday afternoon, Spears was back at the fold-up table, now with a laminated A4 sheet headed ‘Terms of Service’. It stated that predictions were ‘non-transferable’ and that refunds would be issued only in the event of ‘a genuine act of God, verified by a qualified actuary’. Asked whether she saw the fixed penalty notice coming, Spears said: ‘I saw everything. I just didn’t think it would be Kevin.’ She then looked past the reporter at a man in a high-vis jacket and said: ‘You. Thursday. Bring a bucket.’ The man, who gave his name as Terry, 61, of Hendon, said he already had a bucket. Spears nodded. ‘Then you’re ready,’ she said.

I have been watching this from the start. You have been reading this article for several minutes now. You are wondering whether your own kitchen is at risk. It is. Not from water. From something you have put off for years. I would tell you what, but you already know. That’s the point.