Magic and Apples

Here's a fruity Happy New Year:

It's a red apple with the message grown into it. Very common in Holland, whence this one came, apparently (well, they've got to do something, since they can't go walking in the hills).

How do they do it? Well, I'm not sure of the details, but I confess that as a child I used to do a similar thing to apples myself. You find your apple on the tree, long before it's ripe but just as it's getting big, and stick a piece of black tape over it with the shape you want cut out of it. Then the light can't get at the black bit, so the shape ripens along with the apple, and there you are. Magic.

And while I'm on the subject of magic, go and see the excellent film The Prestige which is about two Victorian conjurers and works like a magic trick.

A trick is in three parts:

the pledge (where you are shown something ordinary, such as a dove)

the turn (where it does something extraordinary, such as disappearing)

the prestige (the climax that makes you applaud, such as bringing the dove back again).

Now then, since John kindly texted me and told me the above when I was on the way to the cinema, I was all prepared for a film with the title The Prestige, oh yes, I knew just what it was going to do: and I am, you know, the woman who guessed the twist in The Sixth Sense. (Mind you, I knew there was a twist, which helped).

So I sat back smugly to watch The Prestige and was completely taken by surprise. It's people like me who keep magicians in business.