Circus

Good morning – especially if you’re on the road, and especially if you’re in need of a pit stop.

As a jobbing stand-up comic, I do plenty of late-night drives, and not long ago I was heading home, long past midnight, where at a motorway service station, I saw something I’d never seen before. A vast chunk of the car park taken over by... a travelling circus.

They hadn’t pitched tent in the parking bays or anything – they were literally travelling, and needed a comfort break. So out of the lorries and caravans poured dozens of circus professionals, mostly still with hints of their outfits on.

Soon I was entering the building, holding the door for daredevil stunt riders and dancers, queuing for coffee with jugglers, and enjoying a late-night pasty next to a table of clowns.

‘You don’t see that every day,’ I mumbled. ‘Actually, we do,’ said a roadie. Fair point. Their workplace may be a little different, but it’s theirs. And as a stand-up comic myself, surely I too was just another clown – only I wore a suit and shoes that are the right size.

One person’s ‘unusual’ is another’s ‘business as usual’, I guess. Even travelling circuses need to stop travelling now and then. The strongmen need strong coffee, the ringmaster needs to lay down his hat, and as for the clown car in the car park, well the doors were hanging off.

I pray that when our lives feel like a busy circus, we’ll remember to pull in and pause. May we be divinely refreshed and refuelled. And may God, the Almighty ringmaster, bless us all, clowns that we can be, from time to time.

Amen