Chapter 238: Stinky Little Pilgrim

 Où est la sortie?! 

Bonjour! Bonjour! Normally there is absolutely no way I'd go out on a school night, particularly a Monday with a full week ahead. But Riss Obolensky's Stinky Little Pilgrim at Jacksons Lane, part of this year’s London Clown Festival, was beckoning. They had me at the title, quite frankly (see previous post). As I walked into the foyer I heard a group of friends hailing each other in French with hilarity, as though sharing some sort of inside joke. My ears pricked up. You can take the French teacher out of the classroom, mais...

In honour of the occasion I had put round my neck a pilgrim's conch shell, a present from my sister who walked the Camino to Santiago. And my naked mermaid, a sailing talisman echoing the siren call of the evening. As it turned out, exactly the right company for the evening ahead.

Having arrived in the nick of time, I tested the patience of the theatre gods and ordered a gin and tonic, then immediately stressed about the delay, my own doing, as I'd booked a seat right at the front in the centre as a show of support and was suddenly worried about being conspicuous, picking my way through other punters as the show was about to start. Then I worried the lovely bar staff would pick up on my stress and didn't want them to worry. Some days I am my own worst enemy.

I slid into my seat. A beautiful spirit with all the grace and bearing of a dancer took their seat next to me, clearly knowing half the row, with an exuberance that set the tone for the audience there. The lights dimmed. A voiceover introduced us to the world of a medieval French pilgrim. And in came Riss with all the ribald earthiness of jester pilgrim. They took in the audience and within minutes got our knees dancing and shoulders shrugging off with gallic insouciance all the cares of the day. Bonjour! Bonjour! Encore! Choral repetition in different registers, which is exactly what I do in the classroom to switch the energy round of reluctant teenagers. Home from home, really. But Riss takes it to another level. There was an energy generated by a boundless freedom of movement and bonkersness that could go in any direction.

Theirs was a pilgrim wearing pantaloons held up with a belt, a tunic and a white pilgrim's capuchon like Marianne, French liberté incarnate, their face and legs caked in clay with streaks of mud and Jesus-style sandals. This is a pilgrim who had walked miles (to say kilometres here feels reductive). Their presence loomed so large, I was struck later by their petite frame in contrast.

Our pilgrim launched into a quirky franglais with a couple of Spanish kinks that delighted the audience. The teacher in me approved of their choice of cognate, Les Voyageurs, rather than pèlerin or peregrino, though they later slipped that in en passant, to encompass the audience in a sentiment of camaraderie. And locations took on an exotic hue. Where are you from? Bethnal Verde, par exemple, ou bien, Bal-jambon? The language play was as gratifying as the physical comedy. We followed a narrative arc of a pilgrim on the cusp of arriving at their destination. Looking for what? The Holy Grail? Not quite, as it turns out. But I don't want a spoiler. This is a work in progress and part of the joy of it as an audience member is not knowing where the show will lead.

Immersed in their world, with a receptive audience, Riss drew out the clown in certain audience members too and riffed off the energy.  Their physical comedy is absurd and anarchic, quicksilver in pace and wit, never quite where you expect it to go, yet they get the audience to follow them anywhere.  

There was one moment I won't describe in full. It involved an object, dirty if not disgusting, and what they did with it, in a sequence of escalating audacity, culminated in the audience erupting in a collective gasp once became clear where it is heading. They paused. Looked at us. Then took it further. The bouffon at work. The French have a word, jolielaid.e, which describes their transformation through clowning so well. Grotesque, gleeful, completely committed. They had us right where they wanted us.

At one point we were directed to take off our shoes. My neighbour was apologetic, and that made me laugh. Suddenly I was twenty again, on a long train journey to Málaga, incarcerated in an enclosed carriage for six opposite a Spanish grandmother, opening her wicker picnic basket and cutting into a particularly fruity cheese, while four Japanese tourists blithely took off their trainers after clearly having spent the day sightseeing. Nothing will ever beat that stench in my imaginings.

 I tried to take refuge in the restaurant car, but the guard sent me back with the sentence ringing in my ears: "It is the smell of humanity, señorita, welcome to the world." And that's the point, isn't it? We are all stinky little pilgrims farting and belching our way through life. If you aren't, you are not living. As someone somewhere once said, our ass is always clenched because we're afraid to express ourselves, afraid to be alienated or singled out. And that's the function of a great clown, to release all that hot air with which we puff ourselves up, to give ourselves permission to let go, to get us through that embarrassment, to celebrate this big fat juicy life, to join in and laugh at it.

As fellow ClownFester Jamie Wood puts it: "for me clowning is reconnecting to a part of all of us that doesn't mind being seen as ridiculous and idiotic… a celebration of what it is to be human… the live connection between all of us in this thing that will never happen again in this constellation." Sacré bleu!

Amidst the comedy of errors there is a poignancy too. What the Stinky Little Pilgrim does expertly is illustrate how the journey is both one of companionship and of aloneness, and there are moments where we cannot say au revoir, but, needs must, have to bid adieu. It triggered a memory. The day after Mum died, walking along the corridor to her bedroom, with one of my sisters. I had never seen a dead body before. As I came to the door, my chest tightened, as though my heart was being squeezed in a tourniquet, and I realised with force that I would have to cross the threshold on my own. That's death for you. There is a fine line between le seuil and le deuil. But the need to say farewell with Love trumped fear, which carried me across, and while it took several months for the pain in my sternum to ease up, the experience is not one I would trade for the world. It marked a transition period, a falling into the second half of life for me.

This show puts the spotlight on that transformation too, catharsis for all our lives' journeys. In a world where the Pope recently got thunderous applause globally for his warnings about AI, the work of performers is a case in point as to the art of living. As Riss themself puts it: "I wish more people understood that clowning is in essence magic and energy work." We all need luminaries in our life to light up the way ahead. I hung around after to say thank you. Riss was radiant. Having discovered we both practice Qi Gong, we talked energy and the way certain practitioners weave this quietly into their creative process, a conversation to be explored further another time.

Outside the theatre, there was a magnificent sunset. I basked in the glow of an evening light, having laughed my heart out, and surreptitiously shed a few tears in the dark. I then thought of capturing a snapshot for posterity, but I am rubbish at selfies. A passer-by spotted my flailing attempts and offered to take a picture. He was a confident Continental in a classic navy quilted jacket, off home after a day in the city - the type my Swiss husband would know or be.  So, while my automatic British instinct would have been to politely decline, not wanting to be a bother, I checked myself and handed over my phone to this complete stranger, who was somehow familiar. "You want the church in the background, yes?" It's not a church, it's a theatre, I replied, a bit too quickly, possibly a tad defensively. Checked myself again. I was just nervous about being looked at, albeit through a lens. And then it struck me that perhaps the fates had aligned for this encounter not so much to capture a photo, but to bring home how fitting the ecclesiastical structure of Jacksons Lane was for the pilgrim's journey. The knave had found their nave. Divine intervention, peut-être…?

When I got home that night I drew a card from a meditation deck of cards to gather my thoughts and drew The Fool, stepping off a cliff. Of course. It brought to mind the work of François Villon, medieval poet, from university days. Inspired now to return to his words, I like the synchronicty of the Fool leading into what could easily be a pilgrim's hymn. Or hers. Or theirs. All ours:

 

En mon pays suis en terre loingtaine,               In my own country I am in a far off land
[…]                                                                   […]
Puissant je suis sans force et sans pouoir,       I am strong but I have no force or power
Je gaigne tout et demeure perdent,                  I win all yet remain a loser
Au point du jour diz:                                        At break of day I say
«Dieu vous doint bon soir!»"                           Goodnight.
[…]                                                                   […]
Gisant envers j'ay grand paour de chëoir        When I lie down I have a great fear of falling.

François Villon - Ballade du concours de Blois

NEXT work in progress sharing is on 16 July at Shoreditch Town Hall as part of  "SUMMER IN THE DITCH" (9-18 July). 

Cover photo credit: Riss Obolensky

Chapter 237: On Memories, Milestones and the Pilgrim Soul

“You know what a wine pairing has in common with giving birth…?”

“Mum, seriously?!”

“...You don’t know what you are getting and it’s always a lovely surprise.”

My husband Xavier raised an eyebrow. “Or a disappointment,” he observed drily, having ordered his own carafe, ever the cynic to my glass half full.  As they sing in Barnum, “you wonder how we made it down the aisle…”  I assured the kids he really was joking.

Anyway, there we were at Mallow last night, an outstanding vegan restaurant by Borough Market, which we had stumbled across by accident at Christmas with sailing friends. We had returned by special request to mark my daughter’s 18th birthday. She also shares her birthday with her father, a neat trick I’m particularly proud of, so we were there to celebrate the Gemini twins. Another circus act, obviously.

We were savouring their Market Menu upstairs in the Floret dining room, which felt right somehow, a little removed from the world, looking out. Gentle, nurturing, unhurried, mellow. As the Saturday evening darkened around us, the lights came up in Southwark Cathedral opposite, illuminating the stained glass in deep colour. We all clocked it together. Something quietly sacred in the middle of a special family night out.

It has been quite a week for milestones.

Writing the blog has picked up again, as I go with the flow, and this week it hit 350,000 hits. Still wondering who reads it. Still publishing with all the wobbly confidence of my early forays on the globe at National Circus. It does not get any easier, exactly, but it does seem to have its own momentum, something that propels me on when I might otherwise stop.

The readers it has gathered along the way, from all over the globe, are a constant source of wonder. As a languages teacher, that means the world to me. It also feels rather apt, because this whole circus journey was kickstarted by a trip to the National Circus on a taster afternoon with a dozen girlfriends of all nationalities, on what happened to be International Women's Day in 2014, while the BBC World Service was there filming (Chapter 1 - click here). Talk about synchronicity.

The other day, watching Rivals on television, I was reminded of the Yeats line, “but one man loved the pilgrim soul in you,” and it has been rattling around my head ever since. Or one woman. Perhaps that is what birthdays, marriages, motherhood, friendship and old family jokes are really marking. The pilgrim soul in each of us, still travelling.

And so pilgrimages have been on my mind. A zeitgeist, perhaps. Last week, invigilating an exam, I watched one boy give up the holy ghost over a blank paper. The last question asked why people go on pilgrimages. Did he know what a pilgrimage was? No, Miss, he replied despondently. How to explain that in a whisper, without giving the game away? I did my best. It stayed with me afterwards.

El Camino to Santiago has been calling for years. Last year one of my adult students sent me a virtual postcard when she arrived there after I taught about it, which settled matters. One day. One of my sisters and I have been talking about it, and daydreaming about paradors en route, in the wake of Mum's death. Maybe next year, which is a special Jubilee year.

Then yesterday at ParkRun, volunteering as a Park Walker, I had to pick up my pace to keep up with a grandmother called Ann, which was also my mum’s name. She was being met at the end by her granddaughter, Lucy. She has been doing ParkRun since the early Bushey Park days and is planning to reach her 350th milestone this month. It strikes me how many people I have met along the way who took up ParkRun because they had lost someone or something. The secular pilgrimage, it turns out, is everywhere. It felt like a sign.

And then another thought popped into my head. The London ClownFest is running at Jacksons Lane, and on Monday evening Riss Obolensky brings a work in progress, Stinky Little Pilgrim. “Part reckoning, part ritual, part prayer. An award-winning clown with a tent, walking around Jacksons Lane, asking where the nearest exit is. Get lost. Get found. Get lost again. Call your mum,” the blurb reads.

I used to call mine every day when I could. Maybe that is the gap writing is picking up to fill recently.

And then I noticed that Lamorna Ash had liked Riss's post. I read her book "Don't Forget We're Here Forever" in one go last Easter when it came out, an exploration of why a new generation is turning back toward faith in an age of uncertainty. There is a frequency there, a wavelength, a vibration. Sometimes, after losing someone, finding the faith to carry on the journey can create its own new connections.

The pilgrimage takes many forms. A Saturday morning ParkRun. A vegan restaurant by Borough Market where Southwark Cathedral lights up at dusk. A clown with a tent and an OS map that provides no answers. A blog that keeps moving forward even when you are not entirely sure where it is going.

We walk. We question. We put ourselves out there. Occasionally, we hide back under the duvet until the embarrassment passes.

It is a funny old world, as Dad used to say.

And perhaps that is why we keep walking.

Riss Obolensky's "Stinky Little Pilgrim" is a work in progress, part of London Clown Fest, and showing tomorrow night (Monday 8th June) at Jacksons Lane. Click here for tickets. 

Photo credit: Pilgrims in stained glass window of Canterbury Cathedral taken by Peter Barritt as featured in Guardian article (click here)

Chapter 236: Take That... and Circus!

"Mark, meet Lucy, she loves circus and goes to trapeze classes." A mutual friend waved me over to jump the coffee queue at Nero's to join them. That was over ten years ago now, but it comes back to me now in the form of a zeitgeist. Mark said he liked trapeze too, and had some experience himself. There it was, an open door, an invitation. And instead of walking through it, and asking questions, I launched into an enthusiastic monologue about the oversubscribed classes at the National Circus, the history of Circus Space, and my top tips for him enrolling there, then grabbed my coffee and dashed out, with the feeling I had just embarrassed myself, but not quite sure why.

It was only as the caffeine kicked in that the penny dropped.

Of course Mark Owen knew about circus. It was the theme of the whole sell-out Take That tour. Turns out not only had I skipped one queue, I missed another cue entirely. I felt like a muppet. A well-meaning, trapeze-enthusiast muppet at the beginning of a circus journey, who had just lectured a superstar with a wealth of experience about how to book an aerial beginners class...

Maybe I hadn't clicked sooner because for the Mum on the school coffee run this was all out of context. The world of Take That had hitherto belonged to the sixth form common room at school. I remember us all watching an entire concert on television, the kind of communal experience that doesn't really exist anymore, everyone on the same sofa, at the same moment, singing our hearts out, no scrolling away.

A couple of years after the Nero's encounter I found myself at the 02 for The Circus Live, a girls' night out with all the giggles that entails. It was brilliant in the truest sense of the word, dazzling, luminous, joyful. Cloudswing. Pyrotechnics blazing through Relight My Fire. A spinning globe with aerialist Katherine Arnold suspended beneath it, the whole world turning. A duo act in red silks. Luminous birds thrown against darkness. Clown Joe Dieffenbacher in a hamster wheel, The Engineer who magicked up a flying bike that carried the singers aloft. The kind of show that makes you understand why human beings have always gathered in the dark to watch other human beings do impossible things.

I cannot believe I never wrote about it. In retrospect, now I get it. That same month I had celebrated a wedding anniversary and a family wedding, and when Giffords Circus came to town I went to that too, which did make it onto the blog, the only post that month in 2015. And then there was the small matter of hosting a Moulin Rouge party for my husband's fortieth a couple of days after the concert. I had opened the door early that evening, for a pre-party cocktail in the garden, for neighbours en route to a West End cabaret. They turned up accompanied by their friend, actor Lesley Joseph, who took one look at me dolled up to the nines, choker, corset, red rose in my hair, backlit by red light from a flashing windmill sign and declared "Ooh, I'm not sure I should enter this den of iniquity!" Birds of a Feather, indeed. Take That!

And now Take That have brought the greatest show back, outdoors this summer, and I cannot be there. But this is the life we are given... and so I am living it vicariously, through the eyes and footage of those who are.

It was Instagram that first put the concert on my radar, as I follow tightwire walker Ellis Grover, whose footage stopped me mid-scroll. There he was, moving across the wire to Patience, that song about waiting and trust and things arriving in their own time, performing with the kind of grace and generosity that makes you forget you are watching something technically terrifying. He does stunts that should not be possible and makes them look like conversation. I have never seen him perform live. Watching the footage, I felt that particular wistfulness of the thing you almost had, the show you nearly booked, conversation cues not followed, the stories left unwritten.

Cirque Bijou, whose work I have long admired, are among those who provided acts for the tour. Outdoors, on that scale, it looks phenomenal. A Guardian review (click here) described a  a mechanical elephant emerging from beneath the stage, giant sky blue air balloon hovering over the crowd, fire-breathers, trampolinists, a hair-hanging aerialist, and during Relight My Fire, everyone on stage apparently holding a naked flame of some description. There was Joe Dieffenbacher again, making light of being stuck in an air balloon when it failed to descend on cue. That, more than any planned spectacle, is the art of the clown: meeting the unexpected and rolling with it.

What struck me as well was the encore of gratitude, with Take That thanking the audience for giving them the opportunity to perform and making the dream possible. 

I understand that impulse completely. This week as my blog quietly pushes past 350,000 hits, I find myself wondering about 350,000 moments of someone choosing to follow this meandering circus journey. I wonder about my readers the way perfomers on stage might think about an audience they never get to see, beyond the lights, out there somewhere, just out of sight...

The Osho Zen tarot card I keep drawing at the moment is called Slowing Down. The universe, as ever, is not being subtle. And perhaps there is something right about watching this particular tour from a distance, through Joe Dieffenbacher aloft in his balloon, through a crowd singing Rule the World with their phone lights held up. 

And through the feed of Ellis Grover, walking the wire to Patience.

Just that. One step at a time.

Photo credit above: Ellis Grover @ellisgrover
Top photo: Dan Reid @danreidphoto
Triptych: central image my own, 2015, of Katharine Arnold @katherinearnold.
Current tour courtesy of Joe Dieffenbacher @joeclownphysicalcomedy.
Fan photographs sourced via Facebook; original photographers unknown

Cirque Bijou @cirquebijou
Take That @takethat 

Chapter 235: The Luminous Spell of Leonora Carrington

I return to the cracked mug of the previous post, my circus totem now hanging in the kitchen, and into my head pops one of the anthems of Madeleine Peyroux, by way of Leonord Cohen: There is a crack in everything, that's how the light gets in. An artist who embodies that is Leonora Carrington, 1917 to 2011, as I found out on Thursday night in the luminous portrayal by Olivia Vinall in Thor Klein and Lena Vurma's beautiful film Leonora in the Morning Light.

Now I am going to ask a favour. If you have not seen the film and there is any possibility you might, please STOP READING now and come back another time. There will not be spoilers as such, for this is a thank-you letter, a response rather than a review, but I knew nothing about the film, or the painter, before going into the film, and being a blank canvas was the greatest gift. It was such a special evening. I hope you can experience the same.

The film is adapted from Elena Poniatowska's novel Leonora, written by la Reina de México herself, a literary queen and long-time friend of Leonora Carrington, and perhaps that is why it feels less like a neat biopic than a spell-cast portrait, fragmented, sensuous and guided by image as much as incident.

And so to the eponymous heroine. The English artist who unleashed her free spirit in France in a tumultuous affair with Max Ernst, for which she became known as the Bride of the Wind, and lived out her years in Mexico, dying there in 2011 at the age of 94. I was aware of her name, as it is shared with my goddaughter, for whom I always keep an eye out. But while I had been a long-time fan of the surrealist movement ever since studying it at university, Leonora Carrington had not properly come onto my radar until the synchronicity of Instagram algorithms announced there was a London premiere of a biopic about her at the Institut Français' Ciné Lumière.

The title of the film alone was enough of a siren call. Carolyn was instantly on board. She runs an art gallery and is far more knowledgeable than me. And then our friend Jo, a fellow languages teacher, secured the very last ticket. Some things are meant to be.

There is something magical about the number three, and the spell took hold as we met at our local station, unperturbed by the delay of the train, which allowed us to soak up the evening sun and catch up. Taking time to arrive at a destination can be its own reward.

We stepped into the threshold of France woven through with a Mexican crowd, signalled by a very stylish woman with a beautiful fan chatting in the foyer, who I later realised was the Mexican ambassador's wife. At the bar, a sardonic eyebrow was raised with Gallic charm at the question posed, alongside the order for three glasses of rosé.

"Do we have ice? Mais bien sûr!"

I rather love the bonhomie at the Institut, where they are so used to francophiles keen to practise their French and happily slip into banter. Even better, having arrived with a mintue until curtain up, we could take our glasses straight in without decanting into plastic. So civilised. We took our seats just as Thor Klein stepped forward to introduce the film with the simplest of instructions: "Feel it, don't think too much."

The natural beauty of Mexico and France became the backdrop to a portrait of a visionary ahead of her time. As we would later learn in the Q&A, hosted by film critic Anna Smith of the Girls on Film podcast, one of their first stops in Mexico had been the garden of Edward James, Las Pozas, an overwhelming place where you feel you are standing inside a painting. "We were standing in a liquid painting," Thor said, "and that became the starting point for how to shoot the film, using only the colour palette that Leonora herself used."

Resistant to societal norms, I love the fact that a woman with a love of horses and talking animals, how very Giffords, would end up in Mexico, where magical reality is simply what keeps the world turning. The horse was a guardian motif throughout her work, an identity she associated with herself alongside the hyena. Ever since reading Carlos Castaneda in my sixth form common room, I have been intrigued by the notion of a quest guided by a spirit animal. But move over The Way of Don Juan. I am now bewitched by El Camino de Doña Leonora.

The journey takes us, not necessarily in chronological order, from childhood flashbacks to Leonora's brief interlude in Paris, her affair with Max Ernst in the Ardèche, her flight into Spain and the sanatorium in Santander, where the brutal regime of shock treatment and medication is harrowing to watch. The scenes are rooted in the trauma she would later write about in Down Below, and they are almost unbearable. During her breakdown in Santander she wrote: "I felt that, through the power of the Sun, I was an androgyne, the Moon, the Holy Spirit, a gypsy, an acrobat, Leonora Carrington, and a woman." It is a sentence that contains multitudes.

It is worth knowing that right now, until 10 August 2026, the Freud Museum in London is showing The Symptomatic Surreal, the first institutional exhibition dedicated to Carrington's drawings from her Santander sketchbooks, placing her recurring motifs of horses and the underworld in dialogue with Freud's own collection of antiquities. The exhibition is anchored by Down Below, 1940, the seminal painting produced during her hospitalisation, on show in London for the first time. A companion painting, Villa Pilar, joins the exhibition from 1 July. If the film opens a door, the Freud Museum takes you through it.

Throughout the film, the animal world speaks to Leonora in ways others cannot hear. In Paris, a fox acts as threshold creature, foreshadowing the hyena to come. In the Ardèche, a Cheshire-cat voice functions as an alter-ego, observing from just off camera. And in Mexico, a monkey chatters at her side, while the hyena, having performed a breakthrough act in a childhood memory unlocked in the sanatorium, leads her to a sacred burial site.

It is in Mexico too that she finds her great friend and fellow artist Remedios Varo, with whom she shares a passionate interest in the occult, alchemy, Gnostic doctrines and ancient Celtic mythology, the same tradition Leonora had absorbed from her Irish mother as a child. Their friendship becomes one of the film's beating hearts. As foretold by the cards Remedios draws, Leonora is moving towards a new life.

Mexico is also fitting because it is a culture where death is very much part of the everyday, as in one of my all-time favourite novels, Juan Rulfo's Pedro Páramo. Thor in the Q&A described how he was fascinated by the very different relationship with death that Mexicans have compared with Europeans. For them, it is an everyday topic, metaphysical and present, lived in the open. Leonora, he said, was quite afraid of death, and while in Europe it may happen behind closed doors, in Mexico, facing it became part of her liberation.

Leonora strikes me as une femme savante, and perhaps this is why she bristles against the surrealist enthusiasm for the ultimate female muse, la femme enfant, and quickly sets Breton straight when he tries to box her into that category in Paris. You may put us on a pedestal, but we are still the ones having to change the sheets, she effectively points out. It reminded me of Simone de Beauvoir decrying endless housework as more tedious than the task of Sisyphus. What the film touches on only briefly, and what I have since discovered with some wonder, is that this same fierce energy drove her to become a co-founder of the Mexican Women's Liberation Movement in the 1970s. The femme savante became a feminist force.

And yet there is such tenderness in the domestic moments too. There is a scene where Leonora is looking after her son Gabi, who is unwell, and she rustles up a soup for him, to the quiet bemusement of her husband. Those small human touches made the portrayal all the more powerful.

Olivia Vinall plays it brilliantly, never losing the strength and curiosity that drive Leonora forward, but never pulling away from the weight of what she endured either. Tenacity. That is what she embodies. And rebellion.

It emerged in the Q&A that Olivia had spent time at the same Catholic boarding school from which Leonora had been expelled, St Mary's Ascot, sister school to the one I attended in Dorset for sixth form. It struck me that the experience of being educated by nuns, for better or worse, opens up another language, one that may well have informed Leonora's draw to the mystical in Mexico.

It also brought to mind Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz, the Mexican mystic, dramaturg, poet and visionary of the Golden Age, born illegitimate, hungry for learning, devoted to female connection through a language large enough to contain her. I was one of only two students who turned up for a lecture about her at university. The other was a girl from New Hall. Another school Leonora got kicked out of. Funny how these threads keep weaving themselves in.

As for Remedios Varo, Olivia said hers was the most important relationship in the film for her:

"As sisters, as women, as mothers. I felt very connected from the beginning and hope that the spirits feel we've done them justice."

She really did.

I was also moved by the character of Edward James as an extraordinarily kind and patient friend, someone who had clearly faced his own darkness and was holding out a hand from the other side. Everything about him radiated peace, from the moment we saw the yellow kaftan. Ryan Gage brought him to life with a stillness and grace that felt entirely right for a man who expressed himself most fully through the gardens he built and the art of others he championed.

I later discovered that Edward James' family home is West Dean, now a hub of creative workshops, and here serendipity steps in. When my father retired in his seventies, he took up wood carving there. I have only one piece of his, the very first he made, in fact. An owl. It came with me to university and has been watching over me ever since, standing in a wooden sake box, a gift from Japanese students I gave tours to one summer. He watches as I write now, with his big round eyes. Another guardian animal, perhaps. Not a horse or a hyena, but mine. And fitting too, for the owl is the original lunar bird, a creature of the moon in Celtic tradition, keeper of hidden wisdom, at home in the dark. Carrington would have approved.

A small aside, and a delight: the very well-known Mexican actor Luis Gerardo Méndez appears in two different roles in the film. An audience member spotted it in the Q&A, which gave added wit to the moment when Leonora meets the psychologist and asks, with perfect innocence, whether they have met before, because he seems somehow familiar. Apparently it brought the house down when the film screened in Mexico.

Anna had drawn out so much from the directors and cast in the Q&A afterwards, much of which I have already woven in here. It deepened our appreciation of the artistic process and sparked an immediate desire to learn more about Leonora's life, not only as a painter but as a writer too. After the screening, we found the cast and crew still milling around and took a surreptitious selfie with the directors in the background.

Lena clocked us and photobombed with a wave.

There was something about her energy, cheerful, natural, going with the flow, that propelled me to go over and ask, rather sheepishly, for a proper one. She and Thor were both gracious and welcoming, and being skilled in the art of direction, Lena of the long arms took charge of the phone and took the shot.

What struck me again, as it had in the Q&A, was their authenticity. An ease of being themselves that I am, in many ways, still searching for. Which is perhaps why it resonated so deeply when Leonora speaks to Ernst about finding herself through her painting. That is what drives me to write. To figure things out. To see where it takes me.

In this instance it took us back to the bar, where the three of us got a bottle of rosé and put the world to rights with a joy and elation that carried us all the way home.

Carrington's world, scholars tell us, was lunar rather than solar, cyclical, tidal, governed by the feminine rhythms of the moon. She painted it as a goddess at sixteen in a series called Sisters of the Moon, and returned to it all her life, moon and water inseparable in her symbolic language.

Later, looking up Mariá Portugal, the composer of the film’s score, I found myself listening to another of her compositions Dois Litorais, “Two Coasts” or “Two Shorelines.” Of course. The film had already opened that channel in me, moon, water, borders, crossings, and the strange pull between distant shores.

So it felt entirely right to be walking home under an increasingly full moon, thinking about those references in the film, and then further back, to that night in Tarifa when I learned my father had died. I had taken solace by paddling in the ocean, looking out across the lights of Tangiers, knowing that the full moon watching over me had also been watching over him in Petersfield as his spirit slipped upwards, and that those waters connected all the way back to the English coast.

I am part of an open water women's swimming group that celebrates each lunar cycle with a gathering and a swim. As I write this, a blue moon is on its way. There is something Carrington would have recognised entirely in that ritual: women, water, moonlight, and the particular kind of knowing that passes between them.

Back home, and back from my reverie, I crept in the front door just past midnight. Just as I was about to hit the sack, a small voice called out. My daughter had woken with the onset of a migraine. I gave her medication and stayed by her side until she fell asleep, folding back into that moment in the film where Leonora puts her son to bed.

Time, space and experience folding in on themselves. Moonlight, motherhood, water, art.

"The witchery of living is my whole conversation with you, my darlings." (Mary Oliver)

Postscript

The next day I messaged a friend about the film, thinking he would love it. It turned out one of his friends has also made a film about Leonora Carrington, a very different, experimental dance film called Inside the Cauldron, taking its cue from one of her essays rather than her life. It features historian Marina Warner, who wrote the seminal Alone of All Her Sex on the myth of Mary and the power of the feminine. Marina Warner also went to St Mary's Ascot. Synchronicity, encore. 

El Juglar

In 2005, El Juglar, a painting by Leonora Carrington, sold at Christie's for $713,000, setting the record at the time for the highest price paid at auction for a living surrealist painter. She died in 2011. Then, in 2024, Les Distractions de Dagobert sold at Sotheby's for £22.5 million, making her the highest-selling British female artist in history. The market, rather belatedly, caught up with the vision.

A juggler keeps things in the air. Holds the impossible in motion. Finds the magic in the ordinary and makes it look like play. It seems the right note to end on, because that is what the film does, and what Leonora did, and what, on a good night, walking home under a near-full moon after rosé with good friends and something new living in you, we all get to do too.

I began this reflection by asking you not to read this post if you had not yet seen the film. If by any chance you ignored me, please just go and watch it, feel it, when you can.

It is on general release now. And the Freud Museum, until 10 August 2026, is waiting.

Chapter 234: From the Wings - Kook Ensemble

Some reunions happen at exactly the right moment. Catching Sean Kempton and Michaela O'Connor walking into that sweltering Giffords tent (see previous post) felt like the circus world folding in on itself in the best possible way.

I have known Sean and Michaela for years, from the days when they were MCs and creative directors of the circus cabarets I curated for Jacksons Lane. Sean is a long-time Cirque du Soleil performer, an original cast member and comedy creator for Franco Dragone's iconic Le Reve in Las Vegas, with credits spanning Secret Cinema, the London Mime Festival and inaugurating the Millennium Dome, where they met. Michaela is also clown, aerialist and director, with credits from Cirque du Soleil to the West End and Broadway, teaching at National Circus. Between them, thirty years of making extraordinary worlds for other people. 

Kook Ensemble was founded in 2023, based in North Devon, where Sean is from, is dedicated to character-driven, compelling and playful circus theatre. A company built not on a whim but on decades of accumulated craft, instinct and creative courage. A genuine leap of faith. 

As Sean puts it, "We've always been a bit, let's drop everything and... it's a habit for us. But in a good way." The juggling, as he describes it, has to have a logical and psychological sense to it. The acrobatics has a reason for being there. That philosophy runs through everything they make. Their first show, Filibuster, launched the company with characteristic wit and tenderness. Their second, Sand, is something I wrote about at length in Chapter 225 (click here), and it is one of the most quietly poignant pieces of circus theatre I have seen in years: love, memory and dementia held in perfect, heartbreaking balance, developed in part through work with memory cafes in Barnstaple.

This summer, Sand goes to Edinburgh. If you see one show at the Fringe, make it this one. 

Sand by Kook Ensemble, Summerhall, Edinburgh, 6-17 August 2026.
Tickets at festival.summerhallarts.co.uk (click here) 

www.kookensemble.com

Chapter 233: The Whimsical Wonderment of Giffords Circus "Waterfield"

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.

Chapter 232: Horsing Around - Prelude to a Field Day

Things are hotting up for summer in the city. The Tooting Lido is getting uncomfortably warm (time to ditch the neoprene and dig out the bikini!), and the new season of Rivals is out on Disney+. Disney, that well-known source of family entertainment, going decidedly adult in the full-frontal first episode, where Rupert Campbell-Black rejoins the Mile High Club as Concorde breaks the sound barrier. And it strikes me that there is something so very circus about Jilly Cooper. For a start, "circus people bloody love taking their kit off" as Celine observed way back when (see post on GDIF - click here).

I've only just come across the series this May half-term, and have already binge-watched my way through two seasons to the latest episode. It is all so reassuringly familiar. I grew up on Jilly Cooper novels as a teenager, speed-reading on a sunlounger in the garden through the lives of Bella, Julia, Octavia and the Rutshire Chronicles, and not a little star-struck by my über-cool best friend whose father trained polo ponies and told tales of strip poker with the grooms (allegedly?!), as well as knowing The Twins in real life (season two). And so I absorbed concepts like "a chukka" and "nine-goal Argentine polo player" by osmosis. Maybe that had a little to do with my choice of Spanish A-level too, and my coursework on the phenomenon of the "novelas rosas" or Jazmín (the equivalent imprint of Mills & Boon), the magazine ¡Hola! with all the celebrity gossip, y todo el tango.

What do I love about the current Rivals series? The 80s soundtrack of my teenage years, the banter, the cast. The cameo of Felicity Kendall as the agent out to lunch with romance novelist Lizzie (which could be Lucy pronounced with an upper-crust accent) and Jilly Cooper herself, eavesdropping on the next door table, delighted at the sex scene being read aloud. God she was fun.

All this is influencing my Instagram captions. My latest refers to the cloak-swirling antics of Norvil (see previous post) as proof you really can take the matador out of Málaga, and the thought has crossed my mind that with all the material from my award-winning sailing blog (thank you ARC Atlantic Rally!) and my love of word puns (missing my vocation as headline writer for the Sun), perhaps a Cooper-esque bonkbuster on crew cavorting in the Caribbean might be a little money-spinner to fund my circus passion. Watch this space...

I hadn't known Jilly Cooper had died until a neighbour mentioned it on the doorstep, mid-conversation, the other day. Maybe that's what set me off yesterday morning at the Lido, before going to Giffords. I had clambered out of the pool, ten laps at break of dawn, soaking up the sunrise with my thermos of coffee on the side, that particular post-swim high, skin still tingling, the whole day ahead. And then, out of nowhere, Mum. The salt water slipped out silently behind my sunglasses, mercifully large ones, having grabbed my husband's pair on the way out the door. The tears mingled with the drops of chlorine, indistinguishable one from the other, and soon evaporated in the morning sun. The only thing Jilly Cooper and my mother would have had in common was a love of horses. But inhabited quite different worlds. Jilly's was all Polo and Riders, Argentine ones at that, a chukka before cocktails. My mother loved Goodwood: still glamorous, still an occasion, but there entirely for the beauty of the horses themselves, completely disinterested in anything or anyone else on the social merry-go-round.

And then a third woman came to mind. Nell Gifford, equestrian, founder and Queen of Giffords Circus, taken in her prime. My heart always lurches at the thought. Though I knew her from her writing and the circus world she created over the years, our paths crossed only once, briefly, a glancing. My son, now in his 20s, then a toddler, had slipped my hand and snuck through ropes behind the back of the tent cordoning of the horses... that irresistible gravitational pull of small children towards things absolutely out of bounds. And out of nowhere appeared a vision on a horse. Nell herself, who took in the scene and smiled, understandingly: not remotely judgmental, just empathetic. Mother to mother. It gave me the good grace to recover both my child and sense of humour.

Rutshire, of course, is the Cotswolds, where the TV A-listers hang out with the landed gentry, and the home of Giffords Circus, itself a gloriously unapologetic celebration of equestrian glamour. If Rupert and Taggie were to have children, Giffords is where they would spend the Bank Holiday. And if Rupert were still playing the field, he would have a field day with the usherettes in their burgundy leotards, fishnets and riding boots, and velvet hunt caps sprouting a burlesque crop of feathers. The siren call of the big top, and a show this year fittingly called Waterfield, is, it turns out, not so very different from the siren call of the Lido on a hot summer morning: all sequins and saltiness and the irresistible pull of something larger than life.

(Giffords Circus: the main act, to follow. Cue band...)