As a pre-Christmas entertainment, World Traders and their families were entertained on Zoom, by Paul Fowler of The Magic Circle.

Paul helped us all understand inflation and deflation by waving a £20 note and, as by magic, it became a £50 note and then back to £20 again!

He explained to us how subliminal influence enabled him to detect what a chosen number would be, and how a word (‘holly’) chosen at random by one of the audience matched up to the pattern on his sweater when he turned round. 

We saw Paul’s skill at solving a Rubik cube in seven moves and how he detected a celebrity on a page number chosen by one of the audience in the book Celebrity Fails. For his finale, we all participated by using our phones to calculate a number in about a dozen moves, starting from the date of birth of one of the audience, and the total turned out to be… the same number as the number written on a sealed envelope in our full view – and that number was… 1612, the date of our show.

Paul really involved as many members of the audience as possible and his entertaining commentary kept us all laughing. It was great to see so many happy faces at the end of the evening and as The Master said: “How did he do it?”