10:55am Friday 12th June 2009
By David Barnett
There are a few seconds of footage on our camcorder at home which make for horrifying viewing.
They depict Saturday afternoon, and I am wearing my dressing gown. Over my clothes. On my head is a child’s Halloween witch hat, decorated with stars and moons coloured in by my daughter, Alice. I am wearing a pair of child’s Harry Potter-style plastic glasses, without lenses, stretched over my big, moon-shaped face. I am surrounded by small boys. From the look on my face it is quite evident that I am about an inch away from completely losing my rag.
The camera, being operated by my wife, begins to shake, whether in mirth or horror I don’t know. One of the aforementioned children throws something at me and scores a direct hit on my witch’s hat, knocking it over my face. I begin to furiously bang a plastic magic wand on the table in front of me, and raise my voice to the level of a bellow as I try to explain – as part of my magician’s patter aimed at warming up the audience, how people from Wigan magically get beans into tins in the Heinz factory. No-one is listening. Everyone is shouting. A glint – desperate or dangerous – appears in my eyes, framed by the plastic Harry Potter glasses. The screen goes mercifully blue.
This, then, was our introduction to children’s parties at home, thrown – which is an appropriate description, given the state of the house afterwards – in honour of our son Charlie, who has now turned six.
There were about six or seven pals from school there. I can’t remember exactly, because none of them sat still long enough to be counted. We had organised – oh foolish parents! – a schedule.
I was determined to do my magic show. Armed with Ali Bongo’s book of magic, I had been practising my tricks of the mind and sleights of hand all week. There was no way, not in the name of Paul Daniels’s Bunco Booth, that I was going to let all that hard work go to waste.
It was a disaster. I started with a bit of light comedy magic, and “accidentally” poked my eye out with my wand. One of the boys picked up my prop eyeball I had dropped at his feet. “It’s just plastic,” he said.
Hmm. Next came out a small cardboard box with my special magic charm inside... aaargh! A finger! And it moved! That was the planned reaction anyway. Not: “That’s just your finger. You’ve got a hole in the bottom of the box.”
Things went from bad to worse. They wouldn’t keep the requisite distance for my feats of illusion to properly work. After ten painful minutes, I sent them off to eat pizza and quietly wept into my dressing gown.
The next morning, one of the boys pointed at me in the school playground and yelled: “That guy can do magic!”
The rest of the parents looked at me. It was a little uncomfortable. I wished I could do magic, and make the ground swallow me up. Especially after watching that video.
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