My dear reader

There is a soft light today, and the smell of musk. I've been cleaning my room, transforming it from a heartless storage and sleeping unit into a jungle wonderland. Could not have done it without the help and loving boot up the arse from my housemate. How is your day today? Would you like to hear a story?

You may have heard this one, this is the story of how I came to be a circus performer. It all started when I moved out of home. I moved into a house that my parents owned, so for the majority of my time there I paid little or no rent. At about the same time as I moved into this lovely little Carlton terrace, my parents moved to England. I cannot sufficiently describe, just now, the effect this had on my world. Moving out of home is, for different people, either the best or the worst thing that ever happened. I was, have always been, one of the lucky ones. I guess I had a pretty good racket, all of the freedom of living out of home, none of the rent (this came later, when I decided to drop out of University). I still managed to be broke all the time, of course, since I wasn't eligible for the dole, and my science degree was taking up about 35 hours of my week. Imagine if I'd been doing my homework on top of that!

Yes, the science degree wasn't working out so well. I was surrounded by strange private school types who didn't have much love or passion for science, but managed to do quite well anyway. The only reason I'd ever wanted to study science was so that I could become a science journalist and eventually a sci-fi writer. Well, this course was actually making me love science less and less, so it was a huge relief when another option came along. This option came in the form of a frying pan. Actually, two frying pans. I was cooking pancakes for a girl who I had inadvertently fallen in love with. It struck me as strange that there were two identical frying pans in her kitchen. Why would you need two exactly the same? I started flipping the pancakes, and realised that I could flip the pancake from one pan to the other. Then I realised that I could in fact flip two pancakes at once. It wasn't long before the latent juggler within me realised that it would be possible to flip three pancakes between two pans, juggling them over the stove-top. Instantly, the image of a festival pancake stall, that performed shows and juggled pancakes popped into my head. I mentioned this whimsical idea, and A Housemate overheard. She said, "You should come and juggle pancakes on our circus bus!"

Housemate, who at the time I didn't know very well, had been traveling around Australia, hitching, busking with her friend, and they'd realised two things. Firstly, that you can actually make a decent living from street performance, and secondly, that the distance they'd covered in their travels was about the same distance as driving from England to India. So the two of them cooked up the idea of going to Europe, buying a bus, and getting a little circus troupe together. Up to that point, I had been sure that I wanted to be a writer. I lived inside my imagination and viewed the outside world through the little portholes in my dreamboat, so it made sense to write stories. The problem was that as soon as I decided to be a writer, it became ever difficult to write, and never fun. I also found it hard to stay still for long enough to write more that a few paragraphs. "Performance, eh?", thought I. Well, if 'show don't tell' was a writer's mantra, I thought, maybe I should take it literally. I could still make stories, but I could also create worlds with colours, and music, and... circus! This was a fine idea, suddenly circus seemed like the best platform for an overactive imagination.

Still, it was at least 6 months before I could bring myself to give up on the science journalism idea. There I was, covered in red spots, my incompetent doctor completely at a loss, wildly stabbing in the dark: AIDS! Glandular Fever! I don't know! Just stress, just some abstraction of the fight or flight response, stifled for so long that it started in spots and ended up with me running out of the physics exam and vomiting on the Royal Melbourne showgrounds. From that point on, I never stayed for long in a place I didn't want to be.