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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