From the Memory Box 

Issue No 18

Bubbles! The recently expired Christmas school holidays provided us with a variety of opportunities. One in particular caught my attention – the opportunity to escape from one’s work bubble. Interestingly, as I’ve found more often than I care to remember, the escape seems temporary, almost illusory. Somewhere early in February, it was not uncommon to share a joke amongst ourselves, almost a sad joke in hindsight, that the holiday bubble break seemed so far away, more than the few weeks or days that had passed. Will this year be the same? 

Bubbles as metaphors have been around for a very, very long time. Bubbles conjure up a rich smorgasbord of images and meanings.  During the Covid pandemic, ‘bubbles’ were employed to describe everything from entrapment to refuge. In earlier times, Ben Zimmer, a language columnist for The Wall Street Journal, reminds us that the bubble metaphor has been applied to fragile financial schemes for nearly three centuries, originating as a literary device. In this sense, bubble, as defined in the Oxford Dictionary, means ‘anything fragile, unsubstantial, empty or worthless; a deceptive show’.

Are our holiday breaks any or all of those descriptors? Hardly so I would say, on the face of recent holiday experiences I have enjoyed. But then, what of that feeling of which people speak on returning to work, of holidays being a too rapidly fading memory within a very few short weeks, even days in some instances? Worse still, for some the return to work is an escape from an even less desirable bubble. 

It’s not hard to forget that how we experience a particular bubble may have little relevance to that of others. Thomas Hendricks, Emeritus Professor of Sociology at Elon University, North Carolina, USA, in a piece titled, ‘Bursting Our Bubbles’, illustrates the point vividly. He draws on an old saying in which the teller claims not to know who first discovered water – but that it surely wasn’t a fish. Like our aquatic relatives, we humans live deeply inside environments and have the greatest difficulty in seeing beyond those boundaries. 

Of course, the heartening value of the bubble metaphor is its very flexibility of meaning. ‘I’m Forever Blowing Bubbles’, the timeless hit song, written in 1918 by John Kellette and most famously covered by Doris Day in the 1951 film On Moonlight Bay, resonates as a symbol to themes of hope, resilience and the fleeting nature of dreams.  In writing the song, Kellette reportedly had been mesmerised by the sight of soap bubbles floating in the air at a baseball match, soaring up then vanishing, reflecting the ephemeral nature of life itself. 

 From this perspective, holiday bubbles take on an entirely different hue. In times when our profession is under the pump in many ways, the importance of hope, authentic hope, is vital. Where then can the bubble metaphor lead us? I took this question to a friend. His response was fascinating – annoying in a sense, because he answered with a question. 

“Are you merely oscillating between bubbles?’ he replied. That set me thinking. In terms of the bubbles in which I live, socially constructed as Professor Thomas Hendricks would argue, to what extent do they nourish and grow me as against providing a means for just getting by?