January 22nd - The Making of Legends
How I became part of one of the World's most famous circuses.
The meeting was supposed to be with the Environment and Foreign Ministers; the former was off sick and the latter abroad but dozens of journalists were there, nonetheless, to hear Kerim Hassan announce that his group, the National Association for the Protection of the Environment and Children, is about to bring one of the most famous circuses in the world to perform in Babylon and Diyalla.
And he smiled and gestured towards me.
And all the cameras pointed my way.
“Um… hello. Yes, we just came to meet the Environment Minister actually and talk about the organisation that Dr Husni and I are part of.”
It’s pure wilful exaggeration. He’s seen us perform. He knows we’re four people with varying levels of skill but plenty of colour and life, which the kids enjoy and get a lot out of and that’s the end of it.
Then we met the Iraqi journalist who saw us perform last week at the Al Talia theatre, Luis, who’s French, did an interview in Spanish with him. The reporter asked him how many countries have you been to. He used the word ‘tu’, which is singular. How many countries had Luis personally, individually been to? He gave a rough guess.
What he meant by the question, and the way he interpreted the reply, was the number of countries the circus group had been to, transforming us into an internationally renowned troupe of performers with a tour of 26 countries behind us.
Oops.
One might’ve thought the name “circus2iraq” would have given a clue to how many countries we’d been to but he’d hurdled the obvious by writing that we’d changed our name to that in honour of the Iraqi people. Now he wanted to know what our name had been before.
“I’ve no idea,” I said, in English. “He invented the international circus troupe, he’s going to have to invent a name for it as well.”
Husni declined to translate. He said he didn’t want to upset the man by telling him that he had his story completely arse-backwards. This is the stuff that news is made of. This is how I became part of a world famous travelling circus.
If you could turn this kind of comedy into a 5 minute clowning act without language, maybe we really would be one of the most famous circuses in the world.
And he smiled and gestured towards me.
And all the cameras pointed my way.
“Um… hello. Yes, we just came to meet the Environment Minister actually and talk about the organisation that Dr Husni and I are part of.”
It’s pure wilful exaggeration. He’s seen us perform. He knows we’re four people with varying levels of skill but plenty of colour and life, which the kids enjoy and get a lot out of and that’s the end of it.
Then we met the Iraqi journalist who saw us perform last week at the Al Talia theatre, Luis, who’s French, did an interview in Spanish with him. The reporter asked him how many countries have you been to. He used the word ‘tu’, which is singular. How many countries had Luis personally, individually been to? He gave a rough guess.
What he meant by the question, and the way he interpreted the reply, was the number of countries the circus group had been to, transforming us into an internationally renowned troupe of performers with a tour of 26 countries behind us.
Oops.
One might’ve thought the name “circus2iraq” would have given a clue to how many countries we’d been to but he’d hurdled the obvious by writing that we’d changed our name to that in honour of the Iraqi people. Now he wanted to know what our name had been before.
“I’ve no idea,” I said, in English. “He invented the international circus troupe, he’s going to have to invent a name for it as well.”
Husni declined to translate. He said he didn’t want to upset the man by telling him that he had his story completely arse-backwards. This is the stuff that news is made of. This is how I became part of a world famous travelling circus.
If you could turn this kind of comedy into a 5 minute clowning act without language, maybe we really would be one of the most famous circuses in the world.