POP!..

Bubbles. Over the years I’ve seen pretty much all of mine burst and fade to nothing, first love, marriage, friendship, family, trust - promise after promise popped with a pin to vanish into nothing as if it were never there. POP!

Oh well. Whatever. Wherever. Whenever.

Best not to think about it. Best to walk away and put some distance between it, them, he, she, and me. Best to laugh out loud and carry on regardless - what’s that you say Sid? ‘There are always more bubbles to blow.’ Y’know, I think that you could be right, after all, in the words of the song: ‘I’m forever blowing bubbles.’ I’m sure that I can blow up a few more.

Is there anybody in the land who hasn’t blown a bubble? I guess there must be, today’s children seem far too busy with their X-boxes and Wii’s to bother with the simple pleasures involved in blowing a few rainbow shimmering orbs and watching them as they float up and away into a distant sky.

I wonder what it’s like inside? A view of the world through a rainbow? A universe caught within an undulating, shifting, transparent skin. Must be nice to be inside a bubble. All safe. The outside world just that, outside, unable to get in. Viewable, but at a distance and far more beautiful, far more colourful than it actually is. Maybe being in a bubble is like being in love. It never lasts - POP!

Bubbles are so magical. How strange that a splash of water, a little detergent, and a few breaths of puff can create such things that look so unreal as they float against the backdrop of the real world, intangible, ethereal, a passing fancy. When I was a boy we would hold competitions to see who could blow the biggest bubble. Usually we made our own mix with washing up liquid and a piece of carefully twisted fuse wire for a blower, but sometimes my mum would buy me a tub of ‘proper’ bubbles from the shop. They always seemed to work so much better, the blower an unusually blue plastic attached to the screw top of the bubble tube. Those bubbles were bigger, more colourful, longer lasting - I don’t think I ever won the competition though - POP!

I could watch bubbles all day; the precise spherical shape, the incredibly fragile and microscopically thin soap film, the beautiful colours that swirl and shimmer, and of course the combination of all three of these attributes meeting to form a wonder that is here one moment and gone the next – POP!

Of course there are the ones that get away, the ones that float on the wind, disappear over the roofs and on to who knows where? I wonder where they end up. Do they go on for ever never popping, always moving forward on the breeze? I hope so. Maybe I’ll go with them one day, caught up in a big shimmering rainbow, on my way to Oz, or Wonderland, or Shangri La, or simple madness - lost in a bubble moving forwards on the breeze.

I’m going to blow some more bubbles while there’s still time - POP!