Mad dogs and Englishwomen. What's a girl to do on the hottest Bank Holiday Monday ever recorded in May? Go out in the midday sun to the back end of beyond in public transport terms, and sit in a bijou, sweltering circus tent, packed to the rafters, for two and a half hours of sweat and sawdust. Noel Coward would have raised an eyebrow at that.
But it was the birthday of one of my dearest friends, Carolyn, fellow circus devotee, well, she is now, Philip Glass obsessive and partner in crime on more adventures than I can count. She had done many a trip to Zippos, when it would appear literally on our doorstep, but had never been to Giffords before. A special birthday weekend, and this was to be the jewel in the crown. A celebratory year for Giffords too, twenty-five years. Many happy returns, encore!
Before leaving the house, naturally, there was the question of what to wear. A floral shirt with diaphanous clown ruffles, loose white cotton trousers, baggy trousers, as Madness would have it, and a panama banded with a striped cyclamen ribbon. The hat so very Cotswolds, as Carolyn observed drily, if possibly not totally me. There is something joyful about dressing for the occasion, inhabiting a slightly different version of yourself for an afternoon. When One Step Beyond pelted out as we took our seats for the second half, the outfit demanded a spin, with a ska-skank twist.
Getting to Chiswick House and Gardens required commitment. My well-loved convertible Mini having given up the ghost just before Christmas, we pulled out all the stops and hailed an Uber. Like a dormouse, I promptly dozed off in the back, an omen, as it turned out, tales from the riverbank, lily pads and talking creatures. We missed the turning entirely, ending up in some residential backwater before our driver, Google Maps and Waze pooled their collective wisdom and delivered us at last to the gate of the promised land.
How to describe Giffords? Bohemian Boden meets burgundy velvet fringed with golden tassels; Bridgewater meets the ton. Philip Astley's sawdust ring reimagined each year by director Cal McCrystal with notes of Glyndebourne, picnics and the faint possibility that a goose might upstage everyone. This year the inspiration was Potter magic, Beatrix rather than Harry, Cotswolds meets the Lake District. As ever, everything is made with superb attention to detail in Gloucestershire, then somehow conjured into whatever beautiful corner of England they pitch up in next.
The first thing that struck Carolyn was the joy of soaking up the atmosphere on arrival, with food trucks, gift caravans, drinks tents and all the fun of the fair. Though no Pimms. There had apparently been a run on it in the preceding days, which tells you everything you need to know about the Giffords demographic. We settled for a glass of crémant and drank it all in.
At one point, Carolyn slipped away and unbeknownst to me made a beeline for the gift caravan. My daughters at home each have their own Giffords mug from previous shows, ¡Carpa! and Les Enfants du Paradis, but my Xanadu mug, a gift from my sister, had cracked. So Carolyn, being Carolyn, bought me a new one. I tucked it carefully into my bag. Later, in the excitement of finding our seats, the box slipped out and took a knock. When I got home and opened it, the new mug was cracked too. It now hangs in the kitchen, ornamental maybe, but in pride of place. A reminder that, like clowns, the best of us crack. The secret is not to hide it.
This year’s show is called Waterfield, a Gifford family name and a loving tribute to Penelope Waterfield, a much-loved aunt. It arrived at exactly the right moment for me.
After spending a couple of years sailing oceans, our local pond on Wandsworth Common is the closest I get now to wild open water, and I am there pretty much daily. The glory of yellow irises is just beginning to pass over, giving way to the dog roses with their love-heart petals coming into full bloom. There is a wooden walkway under dappled light that threads through the waterfield, and you may well find me on the pontoon, on occasion performing qi gong to an expectant audience of coots and Canada geese. They are not, it has to be said, always visibly impressed. But they do stay. I'll take those crumbs.
So to step into Waterfield felt less like entering a made-up world than finding our natural habitat magnified under canvas, with pond flora and all the odd, half-tame, half-wild creatures that populate the edges of Common and Country Life. While quintessentially English in spirit this year, Giffords is, as ever, entirely international in its cast.
Inside, the ring was all shimmer and woodland mischief, giant lily pads, circles of light suggesting reflections on water, and the Grasshoppers Band already at work before a single act had begun, brass antennae bobbing merrily. They played a blinder throughout, their live covers underscoring the gentle magic with an eclectic playlist of gloriously deranged range: Black Sabbath to Steps to The Archers, all delivered without missing a beat.
And then I felt that old circus ache. I miss bumping into Tweedy, currently on tour with his own Massive Tiny Circus, over the back end of a horse in the stables at interval, back when children were invited to say hello to the animals and mine were small enough for that to be the unquestioned highlight of the day. They would still come, I think. But with two now at university, or on the cusp of it, the old circus outings belong to another tide. I loved the afternoon I popped down with a couple of performers, on a break from rehearsals for the cabaret we were staging at Jacksons Lane, to marvel at Bibi and Bichu, whom I had first seen with Gandini Juggling and last saw with their own company, Circus Abyssinia. Circus life ebbs and flows, and takes new directions, as do sailing families. I am used to that. But I still carry the echo. And then, unexpectedly, in walked Sean and Michaela of Kook Ensemble, creators and MCs of those Jacksons Lane cabarets. I had no idea they were coming, and my heart soared, along with the temperature.
Luckily I had bought a couple of signature Waterfield fans, an inspired move: useful for cooling down, and as eloquent as any Bridgerton ballroom when it came to speaking volumes fanning the applause.
Presiding over Waterfield with poetic gravitas was Raf Shah’s Weasel, august foil to the clowns, poetic and faintly doomed to be interrupted, floating through proceedings quoting Tolkien, Shakespeare, Laurie Lee and Keats with the air of a man trying single-handedly to preserve beauty in a ridiculous world. Weasels, of course, are not exactly the heroes of The Wind in the Willows, but here the name fitted him differently: lean, elegant, and watchful, with an ease of movement that let him strike a pose with perfect poise. What I learned afterwards from Sean and Michaela and have since appreciated on social media footage, is that Shah is also a superb cyr wheeler, master of that great spinning, gyroscopic discipline where performer and wheel melt and weld, melding into one another as momentum takes over. One to look out for another day.
Into this lyricism exploded Ratty and Mole. Stefan Swoboda and Olivia Louise Swoboda-Weinstein were a masterclass in comic timing and rubbery optimism. Fail better, fail more. Their persistence in the face of Weasel’s weary incredulity, became the engine of the show, and when their big break finally came, a space opening up as Petronella the Hula Hooper had run off with the head chef, how very Rivals, they seized it with both hands. There were all sorts of tricks and turns, from a hula hoop spinning improbably off a bunny bottom in a two-high, to a time-suspending handstand atop a perch, in Pleasers (pole-dancing heels) almost as vertiginous as the height itself, and not for the faint of ankle.
If Weasel declaimed the show’s poetry and Ratty and Mole gave it its bounce, Jenna Dearness-Dark’s Odette gave it its voice, swanning around showgirl-style in a sweep of white feathers and moving from style to style with extraordinary ease. That voice, crystal clear, cut-glass and Nana Mouskouri pure in this English Country Garden, raised the roof under canvas. One of the highlights was when she launched into Kate Bush as The Cienna Sisters, in iridescent aerial silks of bluebottle green were breathtaking, took to the Wuthering Heights. My daughter nudged me, “Mum, you absolutely have to capture all this”. It is one of the quiet joys of bringing someone to the circus, watching it land on them, complete and undeniable. My phone, naturally, announced it was out of storage. Lucky I’m a writer first and foremost and I promised to do my best.
Then came the Newts, the Addis Ababa troupe in pink and purple harlequin, all spring, flight, trust and a Brimful of Asha. It was not just the towers, two-high to three-high, that had me watching through my fingers. It was the moment between, the flight, the catch, the split second in which everything depends on someone else being exactly where they said they would be. They landed every time with grace and aplomb, and a camaraderie that seemed to hold the whole tent together. My photos do not do them justice. They are all blur, which is perhaps as it should be. Newts are slippery things. And in that heat, I did not envy them the job of peeling off their skins afterwards. The following morning, collecting my thoughts while doomscrolling, Instagram served me up a dose of @jonsnaturalswimmingpooljourney, a wild swimming pond positively teeming with real newts. I commented, inevitably, that they were very cute, but I preferred the Ethiopian ones at Giffords. Back came a message from Caroline, one half of the husband and wife team behind the account, who lives in Gloucestershire and turns out to be a huge Giffords fan. Of course she is. The newts had done their work.
Sonny Caveagna's Rodney Rabbit was a super-skilled juggler, red rings switching to yellow mid-air, balls dissolving into fireflies as the lights dimmed, delivered with a showman's precision and a rabbit's irrepressible charm. I initially mistook him for Dany Rivelino, also accomplished in that field, and clearly dropped a ball there.
Dany Rivelino's comedy threaded through the show with deadpan mystification, listed as a Stoat though channelling rather more the spirit of Bottom in A Midsummer Night’s Dream, those signature braying ears sprouting from his cap giving the game away entirely. From a multi-generational Spanish circus dynasty, circus pumps through his blood, second nature, yet he gives the impression of seeming slightly bamboozled by his own brilliance. Red juggling rings switched to yellow mid-air; balls dissolved into fireflies as the lights dimmed; and all of it was delivered with a shrug of comic disbelief. He watched later, a marvelling aside, as Jessica Sterza’s Squirrel Nutkin spun carpets with hands and feet, finally airborne herself, still wheeling them on her back in mid-air. Earth and air. The fool and the sylph. A mmore tango-style dynamic characterised the knife-throwing act: Sally Henny Penny under the hypnotic marksmanship of Wily Mr Fox, aka The Jasters, fusing knife throwing and crossbow shooting into a single electrifying act with the cool precision of people who have never once missed their mark and know it. And Squirrel Nutkin? That was Jessyka Jasters, their daughter, the red carpets were always going to fly.
The real-life animals, in the devoted care of Alice Gifford, were as much a part of the fabric as any act. Maizie the Shire horse was magnificent and calm, while a pint-sized pony, barely bigger than a large dog, wove in and out through her legs. Just about the right size to smuggle into the back of an Uber home, the thought did cross my mind... Brian the Goose, meanwhile, remained unruffled and entirely self-possessed, even when giving a valedictory flap of the wings.
For the grand finale, the Valencia Flyers swooped in. Valencia has had my heart for thirty years, ever since living there. Add in a Spanish teacher who once trained Spanish web with ex-Circolombia's Jair Ramirez, and Miguel Angel and Carlos were always going to get a warm reception from this corner of the tent.
So there they were, the pair of Hamsters spinning in the wheel. And then they escaped. My head ducked involuntarily as they transitioned from inside to outside, convinced they would clock the ceiling. Then the blindfold. Then the skipping ropes. It was only afterwards, talking it through with Sean, that I fully appreciated the temperature differential between top and bottom in that baking tent. Having flown planes solo along with trapezes, I should have thought about heat rising too. Doh! The Valencia Flyers defied thermodynamics as much as aerodynamics that afternoon. ¡Arriba, siempre arriba!
Only one slight regret in the end, and that was my bad, as the clowns announced the birthdays at the beginning of the second act. I'd missed a trick not asking for Carolyn's to be included... For which, though, she was utterly grateful.
“Best birthday ever,” she declared.
Afterwards we floated back through Chiswick Gardens in the late afternoon sunshine and there they were, foxgloves, tall and trembling, the big top peeping quietly over the garden wall behind them. Jenna’s voice still seemed to be somewhere above us, rising in the hot air.
At home, the new mug hangs in the kitchen.
It may be cracked.
The spell is not.
