Introductions and What Passes for ‘The
Plot’
I’m Glyn. I juggle for a living when I'm not making
web sites (although it can also be suggested that I make web sites
when I'm not juggling). I spend about as much time mucking around
and playing the guitar, but that’s not work. It has been suggested
by many, including myself on occasion, that neither are juggling
or making web sites, but I digress.
In case that’s confusing, I was raised by computers
(although my parents did on occasion take them away from me) and
started working with the internet about twelve years ago. I’ve been
juggling as a hobby for about fifteen years. I’ve reached the point
where on a good day I can throw seven balls around. On a really
good day, I catch some of them. A while back people started telling
me that I should give up my day job. I didn't really want
to, I like making web sites, so I made myself a web site about how
people could hire me to juggle, the rest as they say, is history.
Basically, like everyone else I do what it takes
to stay alive, but I’m not the biggest fan of mornings so I try
and avoid the 9 to 5. Even when I did work 9 to 5, I tried to pick
jobs where I could get in around 11.
I now work freelance, so when I ask the boss if
I can go off and do random things at the drop of a hat (or the drop
of anything really), he's generally quite agreeable. Given that
I’d be heading off with three days notice, having an agreeable boss
was probably quite important.
I try and maintain an easy going attitude to life.
It doesn’t always work, but I try. It could be suggested I’m a bit
of a hippy, but I’d like to stress I’m not the kind that hugs trees.
Well, maybe in exceptional circumstances. Like if I’m about to
fall out of one. Occasionally I get myself into situations where
I need to hug trees, but I digress.
Jonathan, a.k.a. 'Jonathan the Jester (Official
Jester to the Mayor of Salisbury and European Jester of the Year
1999)' and myself had worked together previously teaching juggling
and related skills to a bunch of accountants (As a slight digression,
the correct collective noun for accountants is remarkably enough
a ‘circus’ of accountants which unsurprisingly, is due to the amount
of juggling involved), so I knew that he was good for a laugh. He’s
a jester. Of course he's good for a laugh.
If Jonathan ever tries to maintain an easy going
attitude to life he fails miserably in this on occasion. It can
be quite funny.
I sent him an email asking for some more details
and he very quickly got back to me by phone.
He’d been planning the trip for about six months
but the person he’d previously been going with had just had to pull
out. We’d be traveling through Europe by van, working with children
and people with disabilities amongst others while we were there.
We’d head through France, Belgium, Holland, Germany, Poland, Lithuania
and Latvia, with planned shows in Germany and Latvia.
It was a road trip. I’d seen films about road trips.
I was bored. It was for a ‘good cause’ and more to the point, it
sounded like fun.
I went down the shops and bought some thermal underwear.
Apparently it reaches minus twenty degrees in Latvia in the middle
of winter, which is easily enough to freeze the balls off a brass
juggler.
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