Two Thousand and Great – Week 45

Dear all

I’ve decided I’m not a fan of magic. When you’re young and you see a trick it’s amazing, there is genuine wonderment, the who, how, where and when, hundreds of questions. As you get older you know that what you are seeing is a construct designed to fool you, if you spend a little time thinking about it you can sometimes work out how it’s done, (but it’s nicer that you don’t and suspend your disbelief to fully admire the illusion.) Truly brilliant tricks can still baffle and astound.

Friday as well as being Halloween was National Magic Day, my final strange day of October – I now wish it was a day I didn’t celebrate as I think I have ruined magic… Battling through hundreds of children in fancy dress and mums in velour tracksuits (which were possibly more grotesque and scary), I went to Woolworths to buy a magic set. I settled on a big boxed monstrosity ‘Mind-Blowing Magic’ made by a firm called Marvin’s Magic that claimed to have 125 different tricks inside - http://www.marvinsmagic.com/Default.asp/Page/Buy/Section/3

I know I do not need to explain why I wasn’t out on friday night but it might explain a few things (like the lack of new recipes this week for the cookbook or much of anything else.) On Monday night I somehow managed to poison myself quite severely. I generally have an iron constitution and my body handles anything that is thrown at or into it. Something went wrong, a simple meal of beef and vegetables ended up like something which wouldn’t have been out of place on Halloween. Food poisoning resulted in an inability to hold down anything more complex than dry toast and water for 4 days and the thought of going out for a night out in London surrounded by strangers in fancy dress getting more and more inebriated was totally beyond me.

So I found myself in on a Friday night, faced with a big box of magic. All those who read Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell might wish to stop reading at this point as my experiences were nothing like those… having mastered a couple of the simpler illusions, cups and balls, dice tricks etc.. I went into the card tricks part of the box which is when everything started to go a bit wrong.

I was introduced to something called Svengali Cards and every card trick I had ever seen suddenly became incredibly crap, the book destroyed magic for me, I suddenly knew how tricks were done like getting cards to go through windows and stick to the other side, how to force someone to draw the card you want them to – I felt cheated… I was going to add a few videos of the tricks to youtube etc.. , but I actually got depressed by it all.

Loads still to do, speaking to a hairdresser this week about getting my beard dyed white in a couple of weeks. Someone else about getting all the hair in my body ripped out. etc, etc…

Also keeping an ear out for something good to do on NYE, several people have expressed an interest in spending it together, I think they all want to shave me or something. If you hear of anything good let me know.

Keep challenging me, I’ll keep accepting

Rob / Devani