What Happened at the Meeting on Friday 17th April 2026

The theme of the night was "Silks and Handkerchiefs" hosted by Steve Irwin.

Steve started us off with a very smooth large silk handkerchief colour change. He started with red and made it change to white through his hand. Afterwards, of course, the hand is shown empty. Following from this, Steve put the red into his fist before it disappeared completely. As a twist on the standard routine, Steve puts the white handkerchief into his hand again and makes the red gradually appear out the bottom of his fist. Now both silks are on display. For a final flourish, Steve puts the red handkerchief away and just puts the white one into his fist. Yet again, it turns into red, despite the red handkerchief having been put away. The hand, of course, is still empty! An impressive colour change routine.

Noel was next and presented a card effect using four aces that are to represent four robbers in a casino. Three of these robber cards are placed in different locations of the deck, all clearly around the middle, with a single ace remaining on top. The story is about a casino robbery with the black jack acting as Poirot the policeman. Poirot (the jack), goes into the middle of pack, riffles up "the stairs", arriving out on top, but now has all four aces up there with him. Deft exeuction of a clever move in this story. Noel now arranges four piles, each containing a single ace and three policemen. One by one, the four aces disappear from their packs of four and now it is unclear where they have gone. It's Poirot to the rescue again, as he reveals that all four aces (robbers) are together again in a single pile. No jailbreak today!

David Whitson ended up the night, starting with a long white staff that disappears in an instant and deceptively changes to a large white silk. David then demonstrated a long and large rectangular box with a drawer which is empty. Waving a colourful scarf up and down in the air, it gradually turned black before everyone's eyes - All of the colour had disappeared, presumably into the closed box. Sure enough, upon reopening the box, a large, almost neverending colorful scarf is found inside. Impressive, and definitely requires a lot of time to prepare or reset.