For some months now, deerfold has been showing up to the Calling with two battery-powered brightly glowing coloured stage balls. Initially I thought he only had two, and felt a little disappointed since if only he'd had three it would have been fun to have a go at juggling them. Then one day he turned up with a red one and a blue one, where previously he'd had red and green; this was perhaps even more frustrating, since now I knew he had three but wasn't bringing them all at once.

Last night he did turn up with all three, so I finally got to have a go, which was very satisfying :-)

It's odd what happens when you start juggling among people you don't know but not in a formal performance context. Usually I juggle among friends, who don't feel any inhibition against saying ‘ooh, cool’ if I do something particularly impressive (but who usually don't, because they've seen me do it all before). I've only ever done actual performance juggling about three times, but in that situation people generally don't hesitate to applaud if they feel so moved. But somewhere in between, there seemed to be some sort of inhibition: a crowd gathered around me, so I must have been doing something reasonably impressive, but almost nobody actually expressed any appreciation. Except for lupie_stardust, who seemed more fascinated by the glowing balls themselves than what I was doing with them, and for one guy I hadn't seen before who was a juggler too so we went off into a corner and juggling-geeked for a bit.

Of course I hadn't primarily been doing it to impress other people: juggling glowing balls in a darkened room looks at least as pretty to the person doing it as it does to everyone else, so it was still mostly for my own enjoyment. So I can live without a steady stream of attractive women people coming and telling me how fantastic I am, if I have to :-)

I just walked from the office to Tesco to buy my lunch. On the way, I was passed by a large group of people I recognised as from my company, heading in the other direction. As they approached, I could hear them chattering to each other, but couldn't hear any of the actual words in the conversation.

As they neared me, the conversation suddenly seemed to encounter a lull, and they all went quiet. Then, just as they passed me, one of them said, quite clearly and distinctly, ‘Frobbing trout’. As they went off into the distance, their conversation started up again.

I probably don't want to know what that was about, really. But suggestions from my readers will probably be amusing :-)