Look at him now, disappearing the cow...

I bought myself an early Christmas present - a book called Street Magic by Paul Zenon. You can probably guess but it's an introduction in how to do up-close magic tricks, being able to do street magic struck me as an insanely cool thing to learn. So this book arrived today and I've spent most of the time reading through different tricks and practicing a few things.

A lot of them seemed quite simple, self-working, card tricks. You simply learn what to say and your audience is astounded. So I ran through a couple and then tried them on my mum. I was well gutted when as soon as I'd finished she told me how I'd done it. Feeling pretty dejected as my visions of becoming Magical Mike vanished (ironically) before my eyes.

There's some more advanced tricks in the book that require some skill, maybe with practice, I'll be able to do them well enough and will have better luck fooling people. I was in Asda earlier and was casually turning a 10p into a 50p, my Mum saw the effect but not how it was done and seemed somewhat impressed. She asked me to do it again, I of course point-blankly refused...that was the first time it had worked all day.

Hopefully I'll stick at it, there's some good sleights and stuff to learn, but knowing me I'll look back on this in a few months and think what a stupid idea it was.