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Good morning. Think of a card, any card - as random as possible - visualise it - imagine it there hovering in front you, bring it into focus - right I've got it. Your card is the six of clubs. There is now a small proportion of the audience who think I’m the new Derren Brown. Once, that was my life plan - well, the new Paul Daniels. Magic was my first love - the thing that really excited me, before books, ideas, art, that sort of thing. It seemed the most exciting thing in the world, that one could perform miracles, or seems to, with coins, cards, silk handkerchiefs. I pored over old books full of diagrams, and suggestions for patter. I was reminded of this by two things this week. First, I went to an exhibition at London University's Senate House library called Staging Magic. It's a collection of old books about magic tricks, starting with The Discoverie of Witchcraft of 1584, an exposee of the methods of those claiming magical powers. Second, the controversy around Michael Jackson. Watching the footage of his first moonwalk you get a sense of the crowd gasping in disbelief, just as if an astonishing illusion has been performed. The normal world is suddenly porous to the impossible. There is no actual defiance of the laws of science, but it’s as if there is. Of course in Jackson's case there seems to have been a dark side to this allure. It's sad to see an aura of magic tarnished, but maybe it's a reminder of what a frail, ambiguous thing that aura is. What drew me to magic tricks was the way in which ordinary space and time could be disrupted in that moment of astonishment, wonder. The most banal place - a dining hall, a classroom, could suddenly be the setting for a unique theatrical atmosphere, as a piece of actual magic seemingly occurs, here and now, before the maths lesson. One of the books in the exhibition is a pamphlet written in 1915 - 'Tricks for the Trenches and Wards'. I find it moving to think of soldiers creating little moments of baffled delight, amid the misery. Just as that coin vanished, life can change. Just like that. I lost interest in conjuring tricks after a few years, but in a sense my interest in magic just changed shape - my fascination with religious ritual, and art, is to do with the theatrical aura that surrounds them, the sense of otherness. I see modern art as a sort of magic - when a few objects are presented in a certain way, they gain a weird power. Like the moonwalk, there is no challenge to rational explanations, but in a way that heightens the sense of magic - that we know this is just a body moving to music, this is just a dab of paint on a canvas - but we still feel amazed. Such moments are little clues as to what draws us believers to religion - we see the whole of life as a miraculous gift - but we don’t always feel this - one can’t always feel this. Moments of uncanny magic remind us of our religion’s core attitude - of childlike wonder, of ‘wow!!’