EDITOR'S PERSPECTIVE: Living in our own bubbles

Everything can be symbolic if you try hard enough – and I do.

“Ooh, I say, that’s a bit phallic, isn’t it?”

"No, it’s Nelson’s Column, a monument built to mark said Horatio’s victory in the Battle of Trafalgar.”

"Yeah, I know, but, it looks a bit, well… phnarr, phnarr.”

So… bubbles. "We’re all in our own little one,” I thought. “We’re not in it together at all.” Pretty basic, but it was early in the morning.

I wondered if they had been blown by the same person, particularly slowly. Maybe on bubble rations. Or perhaps they were sent into the air by different people for different reasons. People so near to each other yet so far apart.

The chap walking towards me, for instance. Who knows what is going on in his world? I don’t, yet he’s only metres away.

Sometimes it feels as if all that is important is what is on our doorstep and we don’t really care about anything else.

The United Kingdom is always in the middle of any map you buy in this country, yet it’s not really in the middle of the world – just our world.

We’re always at the centre of everything, be it the Gulf War, Palestine/Israel or the Ukraine/Russia. Yet, we’re not really. We’re just waiting to see what the USA does and hanging onto their coat-tails. It’s what we always do.

We’re such a tiny part of the world, yet we’re so important. So full of our own self-importance.

If you think about it too much – like I obviously do – you can easily give up.

The difference you can make by not doing so is obviously in a slightly wider bubble than you exist in, but that’s problematic. Well, ambitious.

You can make your own space better though and if everyone did that, well, hey, the world be a much nicer place in which to live.

Sadly though, most don’t adhere to that. We/they only care about our/themselves.

We know our own history and perhaps that of our country, parts of Europe, maybe we can have a stab at listing the presidents of the USA. Few of us (none?), I’m pretty confident, could name a single leader of, say, Chad or post-Russian rule Kyrgyzstan.

Why? Because we don’t care. What happens there doesn’t affect us – unless a war can be used to excuse price rises in a thousand products we didn’t realise we relied upon that particular country for. We know naff all about Africa and Asia, except the countries in which English is spoken and those (usually the same ones) that we have at some point invaded/ruled.

I expect we are not the centre of their worlds either. Not these days.

We aren’t really the centre of anything and that can be hard to take when the world is telling you to dream big.

Like those kids (I presume they were children) we are all “...forever blowing bubbles, pretty bubbles in the air. They fly so high, nearly reach the sky...”

Then sadly “like my dreams, they fade and die.”

We can only do our best though. And if none of us try, then what?

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