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IT WASN'T the easiest Dutch but what I grasped was fascinating.

Theo is 69 and on tour with a bike loaded with bags of clothing and, behind him, a two-wheeled baby trailer heaped with fishing gear, two full-sized bath towels and much else that I can't identify. He rides 50km, takes a day to fish, then starts again.

But for years he was a circus clown. Look at his face and you imagine the red nose and the painted white crosses for eyes.

He is a clown with a broken heart.

"I worked in the building trade for years," he tells me as we sit beneath the open-sided shelter at one end of the campground. We are both taking a day off. This morning, he's been fishing. Behind us, dripping in a plastic rack beside a sink, is his full-size coffee pot, rigid plastic filter holder and heavy plates and cutlery. Theo, as I mentioned, doesn't travel light.

He has a warm, gruff voice and the pronunciation of a man with more intelligence than education. He lists all the jobs he's done.

"And then one day someone asked if I could do something for children, entertain them at a party. And that's how it all began." He became a clown for the day and one thing led to another and he joined a circus.

"It's like the theatre," he says. "But it's not acting. And the audience is all around you, not sitting in front in darkness like they would in a theatre. You have a routine but there's no script. You play to the audience and they react back, you see."

There are two grades of clown, it seems: those, the lesser ones, who throw custard pies at each other, and the stars, who entertain in the ring alone. Sometimes the stars become well known. And in a few cases they are better known than the circuses in which they work.

And so it was with Theo. But far from the circus being a romantic, itinerant family, the members are rivals. They all want the acclamation, to be on the posters. Rivalry is bitter between clowns. They depend only on themselves. They don't swing from a trapeze or tame lions. And, to achieve that acclamation, a younger clown took Theo's stage name, he says, changing just one letter.

Confusion reigned, each mistaken for the other but the younger man gaining ground. Theo's identity had been stolen, he says.

"And then the day came when there were newspaper headlines about an unsavoury incident he'd got himself into," Theo says sadly. "The papers printed his real name, but nobody knows the real name of a clown, so when people saw his circus name, they thought it was me."

Work dried up and he was cold-shouldered wherever he went. The only thing you want of a clown is that he has nothing in his past to upset families and their children.

"I realised then that it was time to get out. I went and did other things. I missed it at first but I don't miss it any more."

I pressed him. Can there be anyone who doesn't look back wistfully at life in a travelling circus? Or was I projecting my own image of the circus as a gypsy life of entertainment and coloured caravans, the lionkeeper hobnobbing with jugglers, clowns helping with the performing seals?

Theo smiles. If I think that circus life is like that, I am far, far from the truth.

"Your life, any life, is made up of parts, each leading to the next. That was my life then but now that's in the past. I have another life now. I tour by bike and I fish."

And there was no doubt that he seemed happy. If lonely.