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Peterborough Day of Magic
Millfield Hall, Peterborough
Sunday 6th April 2014
Overlooked by Al Smith
Once
again the call went out to magicians to hurry along to Millfield Community
Centre, in uptown Peterborough for the annual extravaganza that is the
Peterborough Sale & Exchange Day. Not a regular convention, but with enough
features of such events to pass muster. Dealers, lecturers, workshops carbooters
and a fair bit more.
The doors opened at nine o’clock and at ten o’clock, President Ian Tanner gave
the day his blessing with the official opening. The first event was scheduled
for a 1030 start, so from doors open until then, there was ample opportunity for
the dealers to deal and the buyers to buy. Which they did, though with reduced
numbers there was less spending money to distribute.
The 1030 workshop was the first of two, delivered by this reporter and comments
suggest seemed to go reasonable. Although it seemed that everybody who was
interested attended the first session.
Alan McIntyre was the Day’s designated cardman and he lectured for an hour on a
variety of card-related matters. On view were pick-a-card, think-a-card,
spellers, the Classic Force, a blindfold location and more. The response of the
audience showed this was a winner.
Another Winner was the main lecturer of the Day, Mark Shortland. Mark is a busy
and hard-working professional and his performance and demonstrations reflected
this.
It’s a full day, something I say ever year, because it is and as always, good
value, good magic, good company. Sadly, as already mentioned numbers were
noticeably down on recent years and way below the heyday, which wasn’t so long
ago.
The club’s stalwarts of the Peterborough Society of Magicians are not lacking in
enthusiasm, but may well be deliberating on whether their efforts are getting to
be too much of a diminishing return. No one would blame them. But it would be a
shame to lose another of the smaller events. Particularly one as enjoyable as
this.
© A E Smith, April 2014