PARAGRAPH: THREE

Lost words…

Young Mr Git and his coffin-like cabinet of curiosities
"Would you like me to saw your wife in half, Sir...?"

One of the beauties of trying out this “paragraph” system (oh, why didn’t I think of it sooner?) is that it gives me an opportunity to re-examine all of those ideas, notions and half-formed thoughts that I’ve had over the past couple of years or so, scribbled down and then thought very little about since. As I trawl through the pages of Word® documents that clog up the hard drives of the various tappity-tapping devices that I beg and borrow (but – I must make this very clear - never steal) from those around me I find so many forlorn, orphaned and long-forgotten paragraphs and even more succinct strings of text, lurking beyond the page break, bursting full of excitement and untapped potential, but which I never then got around to actually returning to as a wave of other thoughts and events overwhelmed and drowned them in a sea of witterings, like so many lost verbal Atlantises. Take, for example, this random thought from about a year ago: “Magicians always come across as being insufferably smug.”  Now, apart from the obvious truth hardly buried in a shallow grave somewhere in the open moorland of that statement, what, do you imagine had prompted that idea and, furthermore, made me think that one day I might want to write about it at some length? I mean it’s hardly the most original of thoughts, and I don’t suppose someone far more eloquent hasn’t had it before, but there it sat, staring back at me, trying (and failing) to mesmorise me into thinking about it again. Then, of course, we find out that Paul Daniels has managed to accidentally lop off some bits of his fingers in the kind of ironic accident that can only really befall someone who might very well have spent part of his early career trying to persude other people to put their fingers inside a magical cigar guillotine. Now TwitWorld was full of “high comedy” when the news first broke with very few people appearing very sympathetic to how much pain he might actually have been in, because the suffering of another human being is always a good source of amusement when it’s someone in the public eye, it would appear. But magic is, of course, about things not being as they appear, so maybe we should give the guy a break, and I say this even after once being in a Green Room in Edinburgh when the smug little prestidigitator emerged from his own show that was playing the same venue and managed to irritate everyone present. Still, I hope that he gets better and that his ability to manipulate a pack of cards isn’t too much impaired. This has, at least, reminded me why that original thought did occur to me, however. There was a teenage magician on the local news around that time and he was still all fixed grin, crushed velour dinner suits, velvet bow ties and spangly sequins, but that wasn’t what was the annoying bit. No, that was down to the script. All those “Sirs” and “Madams” that speak of politeness and yet fail completely to conceal the contempt for the inferior minds being hoodwinked so easily by the simple tricks being performed. A whole host of smug little phrases that seem to be hard-wired into the “act” of any young table magician almost as if they buy the stock phrases as a kit when they sign up to join the Magic Circle, but which, when coming from the mouth of a callow, spotty youth, just seem to embody the whole ethos of “smug gittery”: “Hocus, Pocus”, “Sim-sal-a-bim”, “The hand is quicker than the eye”, and “Is that your card, Madam?” All perfectly (extra)ordinary phrases but which, in the practiced hands of a trained artiste, are transformed, as if by magic, into something far more annoying.