Page Content (OCR)
looming with final exams on the horizon and necessary qualifications for the future but even acknowledging this importance didn’t alter things. I felt indifferent to it all. My secret activity of hooded monks and night people with their ceremonies of magic and bizarre science seemed to take precedence of everything. In fact it was the real world that seemed the odd one. I didn’t think it necessary to apply for my final examinations because sitting them would have been futile. Apart from the core subjects, the rest of the exams were optional and required payment. I declined them all because I was nowhere near prepared. This ill preparation had followed me right into the outside world and shaped me as the proverbial square peg in an unsympathetic system of round holes. My early ambitions of going into performing and becoming a stage magician had seemed to have dried up. The intrigue of conjuring had never really faded. I had become disillusioned with the conventional ways of going about it. It wasn’t so much the trickery behind magic that appealed to me, it was the magic itself. When I was old and wise enough to know that the appearance of magic was just trickery, something inside me just didn’t seem to buy it. Instead of conventional stage magic, my attention shifted towards the performed feats that couldn’t be explained such as telepathy and spoon bending. Ihadn’t abandoned my interest in performing altogether as I had continued with drama at school which I seemed to have a knack for. With drama there were no hard and fast rules about how it should be done and I seemed to shine in the art of portraying other people. I wondered sometimes if this was due to my lacking personality or the belief that the lives of others were far more exciting. It did feel like a refreshing escape at the time and above all, it was fun. When it was finally time to depart those school gates, I realised I wasn’t going straight into the theatre. However, I enjoyed being in that make believe environment so much that I had to seek some kind of role there even if it was stagehand. I collected the occasional stage magazines and looked for opportunities at any level. I did eventually arrive in the theatrical world albeit at the very menial levels. This at least provided me with a platform in which to drift from position to position without ever really going anywhere. I shifted scenes, I helped out with basic maintenance of the stage but as far as the make believe world was concerned, I was an onlooker. 23 At the end of the day, the secret obsessions had dictated the kind of