It’s surprising how much fun an evening you can have watching Canadians throw themselves around on strings.

Cirque du Soleil is back in town at the Royal Albert Hall and so naturally when the offer of tickets came up I jumped at it. Seems I’m not the only one as there were two whole boxes of us, replete with food and drink and excellent views.

So anyway, four of us from MacUser, plus Mark, Luke, Ja and Jay (for the sake of confusing conversations), and a whole load of people we didn’t know were there. Unfortunately Mark and I got shunted into the box of people we didn’t know, so we defected around the corner and sat with everyone else, much to the consternation of a ticket stickler who was enraged that we’d sat in her seats.

Apparently.

I didn’t notice that, though, as I was too busy with the drinks. In fact, I spent most of the evening very busy with the drinks altogether after leaving the cough sweets in the other box. Coughing is, after all, the ideal excuse for quaffing - particularly as an inopportune guttural outburst could send an acrobat tumbling nose first to their death at any moment. However, it did rather make my head dizzy - I’m not so sure it goes well with the Veno’s - and it wasn’t always entirely clear whether it was me or the acrobats that were doing the spinning.

It was an excellent show, spoilt only slightly by the fact that Saltimbanco, the last time I went to see it, was even better. I spent the whole night looking forward to the women on the bungie wires but alas they were somewhere else, touring no doubt.

Perhaps they’re doing the winter season in Cleethorpes.

The upshot of it all is that I want to run away to the circus so I can spend all day spinning around on colourful drapes with a body like a smoothly chiselled rock face.

Coming out into the rain was a rather harsh way of coming back down to earth, then - particularly when the long, long subway back to the tube was closed, forcing us to walk in the wet, only to find the tube closed when we got there.

Made it, eventually, back to Chelmsford where I had the fortune to ride the fastest taxi in the northern hemisphere. It seems you can use whichever side of the road you prefer when it’s raining - all the way home - and jump as many red lights as you want.

I guess it kept the fare down if nothing else, but it did make me wonder whether life-threatening excitement is really my thing. Perhaps the circus is not for me after all.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, January 20th, 2004 at 11:59 pm and is filed under Journal. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.