Column: All hail the spoon bender
The man had a strong accent and piercing eyes. He told us to find our cutlery and that he would bend it for us, so we rushed off to get spoon and fork and watched him do his magic tricks on the kitchen ware.
Uri Geller.
It was a strange thing back in the 1970s to suddenly have Uri on your TV screen telling you to find stuff to bend – and I recall how spellbound we all were.
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Hide AdOn one undoubtedly famous evening, he told the audience, thus viewers, to find any old watches that no longer worked, so we scrabbled around and found one, which had given up its ticking capacities.
Within a few minutes of intense Uri activity the thing was working again.
It seemed extraordinary – and was.
He told us about the power of the mind and indeed he did seem to possess unusual powers in this field.
What singled him out from other people like this was that they didn’t exist.
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Hide AdHe had the monopoly on distant clock mending and spoon bending.
You did wonder why we didn’t adopt this ability and all become expert cutlery controllers, but sadly it never happened.
Uri had it in the bag. Apart from anything else, this seriously improved the humdrum of after school homework and we all began to wish he could perform miracles on our efforts thus reducing the wrath of the fearsome maths teacher, or the teeth clicking RE teacher we endured every week.
The latter could have done with some help in the clicking of teeth department and so our days were filled with spoon bending moments and red pen moments but Uri made life interesting – very interesting indeed.
I wonder what became of him?
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Hide AdThere were brief appearances over the following decade or so, but then it went quiet.
I wonder if he’s still bending spoons, but then I also wonder if the RE teacher ever sorted out the teeth.
Life in all its colours.
Fingers crossed for the odd miracle today too and I dearly hope we have the right outcome!