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COLUMN<br />
Chloë King<br />
I’m forever...<br />
I’m blowing bubbles<br />
for my nine-month-old<br />
daughter. She said her<br />
first word, ‘Mama’, just<br />
a few weeks ago, and<br />
‘bubble’, to my delight,<br />
has come in a close<br />
second.<br />
A bottle of bubble<br />
mixture is the perfect<br />
instrument to get you<br />
out of a tight spot at<br />
the supermarket. Just<br />
one puff and a bawling<br />
child is transformed into<br />
a cooing, grasping joy.<br />
“Bu-bu-bub-bub-ble!”<br />
They possess the most magical and fleeting of<br />
beauties, do bubbles - oh so poetic. Those spherical,<br />
almost weightless, iridescent rainbows. Light<br />
striking at different angles and reflected multiple<br />
times through walls of soapy film. They silently,<br />
invisibly diminish until pop, they’re gone.<br />
I think bubbles might easily symbolise that important<br />
power we all have to create.<br />
To purse your lips before a crude plastic wand and<br />
blow out a form so mysterious that observing it inspires<br />
a first word, is the stuff of life. The wonder<br />
that comes with the knowledge that your hands,<br />
combined with the right tools and materials, can<br />
produce seemingly endless fun.<br />
But not always. I know. I’ve acknowledged another<br />
kind of bubble, on holiday in Gran Canaria with<br />
my daughters and their grandma.<br />
For ten days we lived around a pool like goldfish.<br />
Rows of peachy bungalows with tiled porches<br />
draped with bougainvillea. Families on sunbeds,<br />
relations huddled happily around boxes of reddo.<br />
A clairvoyant who foretold an unstitched hem.<br />
Apricot light and gravel<br />
beds planted with<br />
hibiscus and carob and<br />
cacti and succulents. A<br />
miniature town with<br />
everything you need.<br />
Swimming pool, corner<br />
shop, bar, fussball,<br />
climbing frame and<br />
giant cockroaches. If<br />
the world ended, here,<br />
there would still be<br />
lilos.<br />
It occurs that I’ve been<br />
living in a bubble for<br />
some time. Perhaps we<br />
all do. In towns like<br />
<strong>Lewes</strong>, dipped into a valley, when it’s raining in<br />
Brighton, it’s dry here. It’s been my home since<br />
childhood, only it is pierced, and the view is a lot<br />
clearer without soap in my eyes.<br />
When I was a girl, I read Ian Strachan’s novella<br />
The Boy in the Bubble. It’s a love story about<br />
15-year-old Adam whose immunity is so fragile, he<br />
is forced to live his entire life within a protective<br />
cocoon. It was inspired by the real Boy in the<br />
Bubble, David Vetter, who was born in 1971 and<br />
died aged 12 of SCID, a disease causing severe<br />
immunodeficiency. At the end, Adam decides to<br />
risk his life in order to experience his first kiss, for<br />
what purpose is it to live without love?<br />
The book made a lasting impression, but not so<br />
much as the Paul Simon song of the same name.<br />
The album Graceland we played on repeat in the<br />
hire car one summer holiday. Three generations of<br />
head-bobbing travellers moving to the driving beat<br />
of a joyful song inspired by the assassination of JFK.<br />
Darkness and light in unison, as they are in life.<br />
These are the days of mondegreens and agua.<br />
Illustration by Chloë King<br />
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