Circus Minimus

For a while there, way before emo, I was working against mimes. Particularly street mimes. 

Anytime I found someone behind an upturned hat, walking into a breeze, trying to escape from a glass box, or accidentally sewing their lip to their elbow, I’d heckle them until they revealed their true nature and either turned violent or wept invisible tears over the invisible slice of cake they’d just dropped. 

I really felt I was getting somewhere, too. I was seeing less of them about and when Princess Diana started her anti-mime campaign in the mid-90s, I thought it was in the bag. Then someone pointed out to me that I had probably misheard the radio news, and that she had thrown her lot in with an anti-mine organisation. 

“OK, fine,” I thought. She could go after the land mines, I’d go after Marcel and his ilk. I’d see her at the Nobel ceremony and ignore her salty tears of regret when I kissed my cheque. But, to be honest, it kind of took the fight out of me and I lost interest. These days I am quite busy organising the war on pandas. Modern times, modern exigencies.

Recently, however, the old enmity came rushing back when I was thrust into the heartland of the scourge. 

I was at a lunch and found myself sitting next to a young contact juggler, along with his girlfriend,  a clown/mime/knife thrower; his best mate, a carney of some sort, and his best mate’s girlfriend, a circus animal wrangler. Now, it’s been a long time since I fought in The Clown Wars (it was a more civilised age) but those allegiances die hard and I was ready to give them a bit of what-for. 

But the more I listened, the more I relaxed. Turns out we don’t have to do anything to stem the tide of mimes, clowns, carneys and other evil from emerging from under the big-top. They’re their own worst enemy. The camels hate them, the knife thrower is really reliable at hitting the balloon she practises with (the balloon that represents the assistant’s head) and they’re all in financial trouble. But here’s the self-inflicted danger that really tickled me.

Remember David Bowie in Labyrinth? Remember how he moved those crystal balls (about the size of a softball) hypnotically around on his hands? Well, that’s contact juggling. I was talking to the contact juggler and admiring his balls when he said, 

“These are really dangerous, did you know?”

“No, I didn’t.”

“Yeah, my teacher once came back to his car, where he’d left his balls, to see it just catching alight and all full of smoke.”

“Really?!”

“Yeah. I left them out on my desk once and walked back in to see the paper they were sitting on turning brown and starting to curl.” 

It twigged. The crystal juggling balls are an incredibly effective magnifying glass. Put them down, let the sun come up, and poof - things burst into flames underneath them.

I dropped some sage advice on how to stop things spontaneously igniting around his balls.

“Yep, it’s as my Grandfather used to say; It‘s important to know where your ballsack is, in this crazy, mixed-up world.”