There’s a joke—you may already know it—about a young boy who comes home from school, excited to tell his parents about the magic class he joined and the simple rope trick he learned. The next week he returns just as enthused, this time with a pack of cards and another simple feat to perform. The third week, he comes home worryingly late. When his worried parents demand an explanation, he says, “I had a gig!”
Ignorance, they say, is bliss, and every pursuit contains a rich seam of it. The frustrating part is that uninformed opinions multiply whenever enthusiasts outnumber experts, but that’s a subject for another day. For now, let’s look at the other side of the coin: the curiosity that pulls us ever deeper down a seemingly endless rabbit hole.
John Shearer was a gentleman. Warm, funny, and despite earning a comfortable living as a professional magician, almost completely uninterested in magic. We met in Glasgow’s Sauchiehall Street shopping center in the late 1980s, a place long since converted into a faceless corporate retail outlet. I was there pitching Svengali decks, employed by a (very real) con man who occasionally dispatched me to unlikely corners of Britain, with a regular pitch back home to stop me starving between adventures.