The start of the begining.

It is not always easy to say when something happens. It is more accurate to say when you notice it has happened. My first indication that I was going to be a magician happened when I was ten years old. I was a very normal kid. My father was British and my mother Scottish. Which made me half English and half Scottish so I should have grown up hating myself! However that was not the case, I was a very happy, non-athletic boy with a love of reading and playing elaborate imagination games with myself. Born in 1952, I was very much pre-computer. For me if a game came to you in millions colors it meant you were playing outside. Dungeons and Dragons were very much in the future.

As far as role-playing went, to me it meant pinning a towel to your back and pretending to be Superman. In fact Superman was very much my hero. A snappy dresser and all round good guy. However due to the non-athletic qualities that helped define my bodily being I was, unlike my hero, more likely to move faster than a tall building and be shot by a speeding bullet.
My earliest exposure to magic was a hand puppet on television called Sooty, who along with his friend Sweep, performed magic shows that went desperately wrong. This seemed to exasperate the elderly gentleman who always hovered at an arms length from them. I don’t remember much of what they did but it was loud, fun and messy! That was just fine by me. When Sooty waved his magic wand it would often cause bodily injury to the elderly gentleman who’s name I later discovered was Harry Corbett. The magic words Sooty used to achieve his grand illusions were; “Abracadabra”, “Hey Presto” and my favorite “Hocus Pocus Fish Bones Choke Us!” To this very day I gleefully use the “Fish Bones Choke Us” in my magic show and it still gets a good chuckle. This was the extent of my early exposure to the art of prestidigitation and as far as I remember it left me with no burning desire to grow up as either a magician OR a hand puppet. No, I had it pretty clear in my mind that I was going to emerge from childhood as a caped crusader who could change outfits in a phone booth and became unrecognizable when I put on a pair of horn-rimmed glasses. Several years later when it was discovered that my short sightedness necessitated the full time use of horn-rimmed glasses, my dreams of being a super hero were dashed. Until the advent of contact lenses I was stuck as Clark Kent.