Its safe to say its been quite a while since I’ve updated this weblog. I got back today from a long weekend that started off with Play circus festival near Market Drayton. I started juggling clubs towards the end of last year and have been going to a workshop in Cardiff run by Nofit State Circus. When I heard there was a circus festival with 4 days of workshops, cabaret, fire shows, bands and 500 people, it sounded like something I shouldn’t miss, and I was right. The whole weekend was good fun, I spent most of the days doing workshops or otherwise practicing and the nights enjoying the cabaret and fireshows. Thurs and Fri night I tried not to drink too much so I would get something out of the workshops the following day, but on the sat night that plan went out the window, and there was much drunken festival style sillyness, including comedy disco dancing followed by skanking and doing the conga to a ska-punk band. It was light when we went to bed, so didnt end up going to workshops or doing anything much on the Sunday.

My pal Viv who I’d gone the the festival with had arranged for us to stay at a friends farm near Oswestry on the Monday night, but considering our worn out state we decided to make our way there a day early. The farm we stayed at is in a North Wales Valley with great scenery, most of which you can see from the front garden of the farmhouse, and made a great place to relax after the festival before going back to the “real world”. I came home with some eggs, after seeing the chickens that laid them.

In all a great weekend. Met some new people and came away with a few new ball and club juggling tricks to try and was inspired by some great performers.

A nice surprise at the festival was the toilets, they were chemical toilets like you’d expect at a festival but they were cleaned every day, and had regularly replaced toilet paper. If you’ve never been to a festival that might not sound like much, but If you’ve been to Reading or Glasto you’ll understand.

The disapointment of the weekend was the food. There was a cafe serving vegetarian and vegan meals, and I’d heard there would be a meat option. It turned out that the meat option was a choice of bacon sandwiches and burgers available for an hour each day, which seemed to have vanished on the sunday. I love bacon sandwiches but there seems to be a strange series of assumptions involved there, that if you do circus skills you are probably a vegetarian, and if you do want to eat meat then you want something greasy and unhealthy. Its fine with me if people are vegetarian and I respect the argument for it, but I don’t like having it forced on me. Maybe that’s what it feels like to be vegetarian.