Yesterday I took a trip into London by myself. I’d arranged to met up with Jock Mooney, who made this video:
We spent a few hours catching up, and then I set off for Camden’s juggling shop, Oddballs.
I’m not really into Camden. Maybe I’m too old, or maybe I’m just not sold on the commercial aspects of the area, but it felt like I was walking into a permanent half-term. Coming up to street level I was looking at the folk heading down into the tube, and by my reckoning it was a ratio of roughly three kids to one tramp. Once I reached the surface I couldn’t work out how to split my ratio between kids, hipsters, tramps and aging punks, so I set off to the juggling shop by walking half a mile in the wrong direction.
After figuring this out the hard way, I turned back and eventually made it into London’s only juggling shop. It’s tiny, and I had to dodge not only somebody flinging some pink fluffy poi around, but a white guy with dreds and a black eye demonstrating the basics of 423. Juggling might be something I do as a hobby, but it really does attract the “skeezy geezer” type. I made my purchases and beat a hasty exit.
This means I now own a total of eighteen juggling balls. Five regular balls, three bouncy balls (one of which has disappeared), four large thuds and my six new regular thuds. Thuds are slightly squishy bean-bags which are named after the noise they make when they hit the ground. Unlike regular balls they don’t roll away, making them easier to find.
Of course, I can’t juggle 18 balls at once. On the Dancey juggling index, 18 balls in two hands has a difficulty of 8.5263. This is determined by the equation
d=b/(h + h/b)
where d is difficulty, b is the amount of balls, and h is the number of hands doing the juggling.
Using this equation, throwing a ball from one hand to the other has a difficulty index of 0.25. Therefore, anybody who learns to juggle 18 balls at once would be some sort of ubermensch of juggling. Anyone smarter than me who wishes to test my maths on this could check out Jack Kalvan’s paper on the subject, but everybody else could just check out this amazing example of teamwork:
After about five hours of being in London I was physically and mentally shattered. I’m still in recovery, and I know the price for this short trip is going to be spending the next few days resting on the couch, despite the fact I did very little whilst in the city. This makes me feel like mild-mannered Clark Kent, only without the interesting day job at the Daily Planet.
