We got into our clown kit in Eman’s place behind the barrier made out of metal locker doors in the camp at the air force centre we went to a few days ago to arrange the show. There’s a curtain across the gap in the barrier and another across the doorway into Eman’s room. Inside are a couple of rugs on the floor, a gas cooker and a picture of Al Sadr on the wall, the Shia cleric killed by Saddam. The ceiling is a patchwork of pieces of wood, gappy, so the place is impossible to keep warm. The building houses an indoor swimming pool, no longer fully enclosed, and Eman’s family’s space is concocted out of such walls and ceilings as are left and whatever junk they could seal it with.

The space we picked last time looked better, more or less clear of rubbish, people leaning out of the windows in the accommodation overlooking the square as we started playing parachute games, 40 or 50 kids gripping the outside of it. The first thing is shaking the parachute, then lifting it and stepping in, underneath the red canopy. Next we turn it into a tent, by lifting it up, stepping in and sitting on the edges. Throughout all of this there were squealing, giggling children running under the colour and billowing noise.

The circle is split into Baghdad City and Baghdad United for parachute football. A goal is scored whenever the ball goes off the parachute over the head of a member of the other side. Usama became our helper, getting the other kids in order, explaining the game, a ginger haired seventeen year old with natural charm and gentle authority. With his guidance the kids were the first group yet to manage the game of rolling the ball round the circumference of the chute – near enough anyway.

We started the show with the music box act, a clown with a broom and a magic box that makes music when it’s opened, a mean, grumpy boss who keeps taking the box and making the clown carry on sweeping, lots of face pulling, the kids joining in with the shh-ing, nodding when the bad boss is out of sight, but still cheering when she jumps up and down on the box and squashes it into the rubbish bin, then again when the bin lid is lifted and the music still plays.

They loved Luis’s didgeridoo, especially when he made it sound like an elephant, trumpeting through its trunk. Peat and Luis’s juggling act went down a storm as always. Luis has the perfect face for a clown, sort of gnome like, with a pointy beard, the two of them stealing the balls from each other out of the air.

There was a near catastrophe as Amber and I made our way over to the “stage” on our stilts, on the rough tarmac, when one of her wooden legs snapped at a knot in the wood. Hayder, the driver, caught her as she fell, saving her head from hitting a metal stump sticking up, the two of them landing in unhurt in a comedy heap of arms and legs. To distract the kids from bundling the two of them, I started the chants of “Wo-oh” and “Boomchucka” that Peat brought us from Kosova (thanks Paddy, whoever you are) and added some “Oompah”s that went down well.

Peat stepped in with his solo juggling act, fascinating the kids with the devilstick and balancing Joe the stuffed clown on a stick on his nose. He chatted away in a mixture of English and nonsense all the way through and the children laughed at the sound of it. The BBC had arrived by then, delayed by a bomb somewhere nearby that none of us had noticed till someone pointed out the eruption of black smoke which wasn’t there before.

The kids danced the birdy dance with us, me on stilts, jostling for the camera’s attention, then swarmed for a go at skipping the rope, Amber on the ground this time after the stilt-snapping. Usama was the star skipper and the star organiser, keeping the other kids back far enough for the rope to turn and making them take turns. We finished with more parachute games, a few rounds of Cat and Mouse, where one of the kids crawls under the parachute, the others shake it to hide the mouse while the cat crawls on top of the fabric, hunting.

The women watched laughing, babies cradled inside their abayas, none of them uncovered, asking me to take their photos with their babies, tiny Abbas, a months old, with a woolly bobble hat, beautiful Sabreen, six months pregnant, barely more than a child herself, with shining brown eyes and a dazzling smile.

Husni always wants to protect us from the kids, ward them off from our stilt-bottoms; they’re wild, they’re crazy, those are not kids, but yesterday at last he got caught up in it, started to play himself. One of the women asked him to play with her kids while she went to make their tea. Two men hugged each other beside the locker-door wall, caught up in the atmosphere too.

The kids were still shouting “Boomchucka” as we left, chasing the car, asking us to blow more bubbles, to come back tomorrow. Arriving the way we do, we’re cushioned from the real grind of it all because people start to smile quite soon after we get there, but once you look at their surroundings, nothing really detracts from the fact they’re living in half destroyed complex of buildings without adequate walls and roves, never mind amenities and stuff to play with.

The day before, we met some Iraqis working in the IDP teams [Internally Displaced People – the official term for homeless people and refugees within their own country]. There are about 800,000 IDPs in Iraq.

In the Al Talia Theatre the day before, we performed with a group called Happy Family, who are doing theatre projects with kids and want us to work with them over the coming weeks. Another group called the National Association for Children and the Environment saw us there and wants us to work with them in Hilla / Babylon and Baquba, in Diyalla province. There’s soon going to be a website for Iraqi NGOs which are setting up, because its hard for them to set up sites without credit cards to pay for the registration.

The boys from the shelter and some of the kids from Childhood Voice’s Magreb youth centre were among the audience at the Al Talia theatre so we were already popular and got huge cheers from the kids. It felt wicked. The Happy Family group did a couple of play, which Laith was in, a long way, it seemed from his days sleeping on the road outside the Palestine Hotel. The karate group from the Magreb youth centre did a display, a small pony tailed girl among them.

Away from the theatre, an artist called Nasir Thamir has an exhibition of paintings inspired by the stories of the Thousand and One Arabian Nights: Alf Layla wa Layl, a thousand nights and a night. Two pictures hang side by side, one with incredible intricacy, gorgeous calligraphy and stunning colours, the other with holes in the canvas, the colours tainted and the detail destroyed.

The exhibition folder is not translated into English, as a protest against the occupation. Nasir was going to put a single sentence in English explaining that, but finally decided not to. Instead there is a passage in Arabic telling the story of Iraq, of how those Iraqis who collaborate with the occupation are betraying their history.

He explained the difficulties of buying materials and framing, paying for exhibition space, which have prevented artists from creating, never mind displaying their work since the war. There is no artists’ union or collective at the moment and the Ministry of Culture has no funds to support them. They don’t want support, he says, from the occupying forces and groups associated with them.

Sheherezade never cried in all the time that she was under threat of death from Shereyare, the King. She just kept telling him stories, fantastic stories, for 1001 nights, ending each night with intense suspense so that he couldn’t kill her. He had to wait for the next night to find out what would happen next. The picture was painted in the months after the war. When Sheherezade came back to Baghdad in 2003, she cried, a torn and dirty book beside her, from the national museum which was looted, Baghdad burning in the background.