Bonjour Madame et Monsieur, Ladies and Gentlemen, Le Garçons et La Fille, Handsome Boys and Fair Maidens!

I don’t really know how else to start. That’s how Monsieur Loyal introduces the show every night. I guess I could start with a hello? So hi. I’m a guy, 22, six foot three and pretty well built because of the work I do. I’ve got the sort of skin that looks tanned but is mostly just really freckly. If I didn’t spend so much time outside I’m sure I’d be pale as hell. I’ve got this fiery hair that’s pretty cool – it’s this burnt orange colour and its sticks up and out of my head, like gravity doesn’t have any effect on it. My eyes are mostly a greeny-brown colour, but they’ve got an amber ring right around the pupil. Mama tells me they are like the trees in autumn, they never know what colour to be but they are filled with fire and are beautiful. Mama has got a way with words – she can make anybody feel special when she talks. That’s her true talent.

What else? My name. I’m Toby. Nice to make your acquaintance. 

Although that’s not strictly true – not the bit about meeting you, I’m sure you’re lovely, but the bit about my name. You see, my real name is Tobias Horatio Xavier Ragatz, and my stage name doesn’t really belong to just me but my family. Together we’re the Ragatz Family Jugglers. So, just Toby will do fine.

I live with a circus... and trust me there’s no easy way to say that. It’s not the sort of thing that you can drop into a conversation, and every time I tell people I get roughly the same reaction – a puzzled/awestruck look followed by an “oh wow”. And then the questions start...

How long have you lived in a circus? All my life; Did your parents run away with the circus? No they were born into it, Are they jugglers too? Yep. Every generation of my family back a hundred or so years has been jugglers.

What’s it like living in a circus?

Now, that last question is always the hardest to answer. Which is why I’m writing this, I guess. You see, it changes every day. Some days it’s the most wonderful thing. You wake up in the morning and you’re in this community who all live and breathe together. You know when you step out of the door somebody you care about will be there to say hi. You know your routine, you know exactly where you belong in the world – and, from what I can tell from watching various TV shows, not many 22 year old guys can say that about themselves. You get to be with all these amazing creatures, elephants, zebras, lions, and interact with them knowing that they know you and are happy and cared about. You can hang out with the most fantastically talented guys who know how to dance on a rope suspended in the air as if they were walking along the ground, guys who can make you roar with laughter just by fooling around, guys who can make lions roar and obey their every command. And all the women are beautiful. They can contort their bodies into the most fabulous positions, they can swing from bar to bar thirty, forty, fifty foot in the air, they can hang from ribbons that spiral down from the ceiling. And everyone respect you because you can do something they can’t. You can throw objects into the air and they’ll find your hands again as if they were magnetised. You can play with knives and fire and know it’ll never hurt you. You can thrill an audience by standing in one spot.

But other day’s it isn’t so fun. These are mostly the travelling days, when you wake up in the back of an old caravan that you still share with your parents, because you haven’t earned enough to buy your own, in a bed that’s six inches too short and all the padding is flat from 22 years worth of sleeps. When you’ve got to do your chores on the move, sluicing out the elephant carriage whilst driving down a motorway, trying to avoid the rivets of dung and the huge creature inside who can’t predict when the van is going to stop or start or corner. When you’re stuck for hours on end inside a vehicle with the most arrogant people in the world, who all want to show off their amazing talents that you’ve seen a thousand times before. When you can’t be alone and just sit and think because something crazy is going on.

Yeah, those days kind of suck.

So, I guess that’s what I’ll be talking about on here. Don’t expect a post a day, but I’ll try to post as often as I can get wifi (internet cafes, libraries, stealing other people’s internet as we drive by and what not) and I’ll try to write something every day. Living on the move is kind of crazy, but living in a circus? I think that’s about as crazy as you can get...

I’ll try to post later about my day – but I make no promises! Things can turn from boring to mental in a matter of seconds here! Either way, I’ll write again just as soon as I can, and, as Monsieur Loyal always ends,

Au revoir! I hope you enjoyed the show!