HOW do you kill a circus? Go for the juggler …

That's one of my all-time favourite jokes, despite my profound admiration for jugglers; all jugglers; every juggler. But a great gag, an excellent paronomasia has to be applauded.

I could never juggle. Despite standing in front of hundreds of walls, counting and concentrating, looking like a fool tossing two bean bags hopelessly, I could never command the art of the juggle. All those lank-haired, bearded hippy types who could maintain a figure of eight orbit with multi-coloured balls would always leave with the girl while I faced my failure head-on.

Next Saturday, June 17, is World Juggling Day. Yes. There's a day, a world day, for juggling. For one day and one day only the world will be consumed by legions of folk throwing and catching while co-ordinating hands and eyes and sticking their tongues out in a manifestation of pure cerebral/physical concentration.

How I wished I could juggle. This desire wasn't just about wanting to be deft and dexterous; this wasn’t just about longing to be eminently entertaining. No. My love of the juggle spans decades, spans continents, spans vast geo-political change …

It was 1981. It was mid-August. I was 12 years old but thanks to the communist bloc's discounted rates, when it came to international air travel, the Russian Federation's Aeroflot was the go-to airline for the working-class Indian migrant. My dad had managed to arrange to take himself and his three sons from Glasgow (via Heathrow) to the beating heart of the Punjab. And he’d somehow managed to wangle a free three-day stopover in the beating heart of communist Russia, the nerve centre of all that was Soviet: Moscow.

I owe my dad so much. His love of all food, his tireless tenacity to taste a cornucopia of cuisines combined with his wondrous wanderlust world-view, have made me the travelling food-lover that I am. Many hard-working, immigrant dads would have congratulated themselves on their wherewithal to show their weans Moscow in an age when Moscow was rarely witnessed by the eyes of the West. But my dad wasn’t, isn’t any old dad; so just being in the Russian capital that wasn’t enough.

He wanted us to truly experience Russia. With only a handful of Russian phrases he gathered all his Glaswegian gallusness and applied plenty of Punjabi persistence and perseverance.

The firm and frequent retorts from the hard faced Russian woman at the hotel front desk had been gradually worn down as her face softened. What had been (at the beginning of the conversation) a sold-out Moscow State Circus run had transformed magically into four tickets with great views. My dad was the most excited I can ever remember seeing him; me and my brothers were more than a little underwhelmed. I mean, a circus. We’d been to the circus; Billy Smart was fine but it hardly seemed worth all the cartwheels and the clamour. Oh, what little we knew ...

It was the most incredible, the most breathtaking, evening of my life. No language was needed other than the universal lexicon of laughter, the thesaurus of thrills. This was nationalised art at a time when the USSR was at the height of its powers; everything was about 100 times bigger and better than any so-called circus I had seen in a muddy, soggy British town square. The acrobats flew further; the horses danced more delicately; the clowns clowned completely.

Then came the jugglers …

The somewhat clichéd clubs came out, followed by axes, followed by live chainsaws. Without doubt, these were impressive and exhilarating endeavours. Then it happened …

The denouement involved a man juggling a dozen steel rings, precisely placing each in an ever-increasing arc yards above his head. As if that was not achievement enough, the juggling genius then proceeded to leap through one of the aforementioned rings while still keeping the others on a tight trajectory overhead. There was a gasp of recognition in the audience; it was as if they knew what to expect next. The lithe, athletic juggler geed the crowd up as he took a clutch of clubs that looked like over-sized cotton buds. The smell of kerosene filled the ring. He lit each club and in no time at all he was tossing, with gay abandon, these massive, over-sized fire hazards above him.

I knew immediately that I wanted to be able to do that. I wanted to be louche as I lobbed axes. I wanted to hurl fire. Yet I will never be anything but that man who failed to toss two bean-bags from hand to hand to air to hand.

So you’ll forgive me for not giving a “toss” about World Juggling Day.