It’s been a week for memories. My sister Fran arrived on Thursday and we
enjoyed a very reasonable and delicious lunch at the Bluebell Café on the
estate where I winter. (www.facebook.com/pages/The-Bluebell-Cafe-at-Barrowmore/247426162079066) Home made veggie moussaka. Anyway it was good to see her as she now
lives in France and only comes to the UK for work. I hadn’t seen her for about two years and,
like me, she is hopeless with keeping in touch. Also like me, she is a nomad,
and sells her beautiful handmade pearl jewelry (www.tears-of-the-dragon.co.uk)
by touring round Women’s Institutes and similar in the UK, giving talks about
pearls and selling her wares at the end. She lives out of a suitcase while she
is working and stays in those pretty dreadful anonymous roadside hotels. Rather her than me, but she enjoys the
performance and the selling is going well.
Check out her lovely stuff!
We talked for a couple of hours, catching up and delving into
the memories of lives once shared but now separate. It was pleasure of course flecked with the
occasional tear.
She brought an intriguing brown paper parcel with her with my
address on it. You probably know I’m a
sucker for mysteries and especially ones involving brown paper, so as soon as
she’d gone I tore it open it to find hundreds of photos dating back through my
life and a scarf of mine I’d left at hers an eon ago. She’d been going through the photographic
archive and had divvied mine out. An
hour of memory followed and the box is still sitting by me here and I
occasionally lucky dip into it and emerge with a black and white faded treasure
of recollection, looking not just at the people but the detail in the
backgrounds. An infusion of remembrance of the places I have been and the
things I have done and the people I’ve been with. Extraordinary.
The other box of memories which has been sitting beside me all
week is my close-up magic box. This only
very occasionally emerges during a show, mostly because the show is on a large
scale and close-up magic requires only a small handful of watchers. I really should bring it out more because it
contains some classics, not just of magic but also of making. Little finely crafted objects that do amazing
things. A true Pandora’s box. I love
delving through it as I tend to forget what is in there.
Memory is extraordinary.
As soon as I have the object in my hands, the presentation all comes
back. Perhaps it’s a card trick I
originally learned twenty years ago or a miniature box that requires a quick
secret unseen action to effect a finale.
It’s as though the object itself contains the memory and this is
transferred to my hands and mind when I pick it up. It might require a quick refresher practice
but then I have it and am moving on with the presentation, exactly where I left
off all those years ago. Sometimes, and
most strangely of all, I find the years of not doing the action seems to have
lent an increased fluency and ease with the process. This also quite often happens with
juggling. If I haven’t done any for a
while (this time of year is a case in point) I find that when I return to it
not only can I still do it but also I am a little better at it than I
remember. It’s as though my sub-conscious
has been practising while I’ve been doing other things. I’ve heard the same thing can happen for
golfers.
The travelling stage is nearly refreshed and ready for the season. A few more days of varnishing and painting
will have it scintillating and flashing in the sun and looking at its best, as
I love it to look, opened up and ready for the audience. The new illusion is also still bubbling away
in my sub-conscious, rising occasionally with a new detail of fabrication or
presentation. I think the illusion is also going to be a trip down memory lane.
Back to a time when, as a child, I craved for a cardboard box to make
something with, much as today’s children crave a iPod or a game
controller. I remember pleading for a cardboard
cornflake packet, long before the box itself was empty, but then, these are other
memories and I’ve work to do…
All the best from a road near you,
Mr Alexander
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