“Lucy, I’m really enjoying your English girl alter-ego of a Spanish seductress moonlighting as a circus performer.”
That DM popped up and made me laugh out loud. I love Instagram at its finest, when there are people who get it. Spain is my passion and my knee-jerk reaction to the thought of turning fifty was to google flights to Valencia and throw myself back into her arms. Every time I’m there I feel more myself. My Spanish friends notice it too.
But I am also a magpie. I love bling. I love sequins. I love stomach flips and swinging upside down.
In recent years circus has taken a back seat. Retraining as a teacher, family life, surgery in April and ongoing recovery has taking its toll. Training, cabaret nights, aerial classes all quietly fell away. And somewhere in the background a question was forming: what happened to that circus girl?
Then my friend Sam handed me an early birthday survival kit. Tiger balm. Lip balm. Paracetamol. A Nero’s coffee voucher. And a card that read: “Running away to the circus is always an option.”
With fifty on the horizon, I’d also been set a challenge to do 50 things I’d never done before. So when Flying Fantastic’s founder Edel announced a full-day aerial yoga workshop finishing with a gong bath, it felt like something new, and also the gentlest possible way back in.
I’ve known Edel for years. I knew the inspiration for her aerial gym came from time she and Chris spent living in Argentina, discovering silks in a gym there. What I hadn't appreciated until the workshop was that the Flying Fantastic logo is based on the Argentine flag. That made me smile. El mundo hispano and the world of circus overlapping again. ¡Dale!
Edel is so inspiring. Creative, funny, encouraging, inclusive and quietly brilliant at making everyone in the room feel capable. The space they have built over the years is more than a studio. It is a family home for aerial novices, pros and magpies alike. I am so grateful for her friendship and the worlds she keeps opening. The studio in Peckham is warm and welcoming, and so damn pretty with its chromatherapy ceiling. There were eight of us in the group, all so supportive of each other and lots of laughts. Instructors, amateurs, and my friend Jane in mermaid leggings that shimmered like an aerial siren. Despite being a complete novice, Jane had said yes immediately when I floated the idea and that meant so much. Turning up, trying something new, laughing through it together. She is a superstar.
First came the warm up stretches, then we played rock-paper-scissors suspended in silks. I lost every time! There were trust falls and gentle inversions, life really is better upside down. Then Edel switched it up in spangled leggings led us through a stealth core workout under disco lights. We had a good laugh swinging on our bellies in a birthday game of Hungry Hippos to grab juggling balls and scarves and chuck them in our hoops. I might have missed the memo about one item at a time, so guess who won that round... Muscle memory counts. It was reassuring to feel that I haven’t lost my touch. More than that, it reminded me how much joy lives in movement, in play, in shared ridiculousness. Jane bought me a Flying Fantastic sweater that reads “Circus Every Damn Day.” I am living in it over half term now.
In the afternoon things softened. Yin holds. Stillness. At one point the silks cradled my scalp and something in me unclenched. A quiet well of emotion rose and passed. Then cocooning to Grazia’s sun bath. Vibrations from crown to toe. Rainbow ceiling above. Grounded and floating all at once.
Afterwards came the surprise of cupcakes and everyone gathered round singing Happy Birthday. I blushed. I curtsied. I revelled in my invisible crown. When Jane and I stepped back out into Peckham Rye, we were both on a complete high. Centred. Steady. But also ready to swing from chandeliers.
There’s a line in Oliverio Girondo’s poem Espantapájaros, which I was first introduced to by my Chilean flatmate in Valencia while studying there, and later found recited in Argentine Eliseo Subiela’s brilliant magical realism film El Lado Oscuro del Corazón (The Dark Side of the Heart).
After declaring, with typical irreverence, that he couldn't give a fig whether a woman's breasts bloom like magnolias or shrivel like dried fruit, the narrator draws a line in the sand, and on this he is irreducible:
Well. Hello, my love.
Winging it.
Encore.
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