I ran away and joined the circus.

Well, it’s almost true. It ended very badly though. I got too close to the animals…

A few years ago I went to Club Med at Lindeman Island. On my first day I discovered the circus school. I decided right then that I was made for the circus. I wanted to do the trapeze. So I did… every day for hours. On the first day I got pretty bad blisters on my hands but I refused to stop. By the time I left the island 7 days later, there was (literally) no skin on my hands. They were a bloody, pulpy mess. That is how much I loved the trapeze.

Anyway, because I had spent so much time on the bloody thing, I got pretty close to the trainer. He was a trapeze catcher (the person that catches you when you flip from one swing to the other). I guess you could say we had a holiday romance. He was fun and it meant that I got priority on the trapeze equipment!! He left the island shortly after I did, to join the Weber Brothers Circus. When the circus came to NZ a year or so later, I got a call from him. We hooked up again and I started hanging out at the circus. It was quite a crazy life – living in a caravan.

Mostly, I loved the animals. There were 7 miniature horses that danced. They were my favourite. There were 2 goats that walked on balance beams, some dogs that did flips, and a llama that did absolutely nothing. The animals had their own tent and it used to fascinate me that they all just slept in there standing up. I used to get up in the night and go and watch them. They were hilarious.

Until the llama spat on me. I don’t know why. It was a pretty angry llama. Not to mention germ-ridden.

About a month later I got really sick. I went to the doctor and he asked me if I had touched any hedgehogs lately. What the…? I guess that was the same way he felt when I told him that I had only touched llamas. It turned out that I had toxoplasmosis. It’s a parasitic infection of the blood. It feels like glandular fever and I had it for a year. I had so many blood tests that they started taking it out of my foot.

I hate that llama.

I guess the moral of the story is that if you’re going to run away and join the circus, stay away from the animals.