My first memory of the unexplained magic goings on I have is when I was just six years old.

We had a breakfast bowl, it was like a football cut in half. I really like it. It had been acquired by collecting tokens from Corn Flakes boxes. I only ever ate breakfast from this bowl.

It was a weekend. Saturday morning. I was the first one up as usual. It won’t be until half a decade later that I’ll realise there’s no glory in waking early and start to have a few lie-ins.

I went to the kitchen, got the bowl from bottom drawer, got the Corn Flakes from the breakfast bar, got the milk from the fridge, sat on the stool at the breakfast bar and began eating.

I enjoyed this early morning time, on my own, reflecting on the week that has just passed. The play time at school, the play time at mosque (which was the house of an “aunty ji” who lived down the street), going to Asif’s house (my first cousin) almost every Friday night. Having breakfast before bed (almost every Friday night). Then BAMM..!! it hit me.

There was magic in my house. Last night was Friday night. Last night I had Corn Flakes when I came back from Asif’s house. I had them in THIS bowl. I left the bowl in the sink. And now I found it in the kitchen cupboard. And no one is even awake yet. How can this be?

Maybe there’s another bowl. Maybe they collected more tokens and got another bowl. How can it be that both bowls have a chip in the same place. There must only be ONE. The magic theory is the most plausible.

I quickly got off the stool, went over to the sink and looked in it. My theory was confirmed. The sink was empty. There IS magic in my house.

I started thinking of other times when I’ve noticed magic in the house. I began to think of loads of examples. Like when I leave my clothes in a nice heap behind the door and the magically get onto the pegs that my dad put on my door for me.

Or when I leave my socks in the middle of the room, and they disappear and then how they reappear in a couple of days in my sock drawer.

Come to think of it, the same thing happens to my towel, after having a bath I leave it on the bathroom floor and it somehow gets cleaned and ends up in the airing cupboard.

Then there’s my swimming stuff that I leave in my backpack and when I go swimming on Wednesdays it’s always clean and fresh.

Also my P.E kit, when it’s nice weather we do P.E on the field and I love sliding about like the footballers on T.V, but come next Mondays P.E session and there’s no mud on my fresh kit.

I know some people don’t believe in magic, but what other explanation is there?

Then I grew up a little and realised that the magician was my mother.

Then I grew up a little more and became the magician myself.