Last night Lisa and I ventured into Ipswich (two days in a row, what's going on?) to see Derren Brown at the Ipswich Regent. We went this time last year, in the heady days before we'd agreed to any kind of funny business and were both footloose and fancy-free, so we thought we'd go again in 2005, to mark the imminent one year anniversary of our becoming... um... foot-tight and fancy-attached.

We've become more responsible over the past 12 months, so this time around we took Mr Magic along with us, partly as a form of unofficial Help the Aged community service, partly because we like going out with men in sandals, but mainly so he could explain all the tricks to us afterwards and pay for the ice creams at the interval.

The show turned out to be very good. Having spent the past year formulating a technique for avoiding flying frisbees, Lisa was naturally pleased to discover that Derren had dispensed with the plastic rings, and was chucking a cuddly monkey into the audience this year to choose his 'volunteers'. She doesn't like monkeys at the best of times, so a monkey which forces you to go up on stage in front of two thousand people wasn't her idea of fun. Which is probably why she ignored it when it hit her on the back of the head during the second half.

Anyhoo, Derren proved himself to be almost infallible (unlike the woman he got out of the audience who seemed incapable of counting beyond ten without getting confused). He made a couple of errors, but having studied the official Derren Brown Forum today, I've discovered that he makes the exact same errors in every show, so something tells me it might just be deliberate.

I was proud to have worked out a fiendishly ingenious explanation to the button-counting trick, while Mr Magic rambled on about broken bottles and tennis balls under the arm. Needless to say that having put our collective heads together, we succeeded in working out virtually... um... none of it. So I've decided to personally befriend Derren Brown in the hope of learning his secrets. And then selling them to the papers. It shouldn't be too hard.

Although let's face it, I've already perfected the trick of sticking a nail up my nose, so I'm half way there already. The only difference is that mine's a fingernail, and I don't use a hammer. But even so...