Here at Big Bubbles (No Troubles) our favourite song is, oddly enough, "Big Bubbles (No Troubles)" by Ellis Beggs & Howard. Yes, that's Nick Beggs as in "formerly of Kajagoogoo". Fortunately, he managed to redeem himself with this obscure 1986 single before turning A&R. Throughout history, many great philosophers, religious scholars and jobbing sages have attempted to describe the human condition and the nature of life itself. But it was the mighty EB&H who succinctly summed up the whole crap shoot in two lines:
"Life ain't nuthin' but a bubble,
Life ain't nuthin' but trouble"
Modern life is a badly packed suitcase of unanswered questions: who am I? am I really me? should I be someone else? how can I stand out? do I still fit in? am I too stupid/ smug/ rich/ fat/ thin/ normal/ weird/ cold/ hungry? what does everyone else think? are they right? how can I be right instead? do I care? should I care? can I afford not to care? am I an island or merely an abandoned mining town? is this love or psychotic delusion? is there a difference? did I do it right? should I have tried anyway? was that it? why didn't I watch the road instead of daydreaming? what's that big white light up ahead?
However, as we tap our feet to the exceedingly funksome groove of "Big Bubbles (No Troubles)", we quickly realise that it's all bollocks anyway so you might as well get on with it. That's not to excuse a lack of opinions. Oh no. There are plenty of those within these pages and we hope you'll vehemently agree with them, or disagree with them, or at least agree that we have some. Opinions are as easy or as hard to form as you want them to be, cost anything from nothing to your own life to cherish, and are as free from, or as dependent on, the influence of others as you wish. We popped into town and shopped around but we couldn't find any other products that boasted that flexibility, so we're therefore recommending opinions as our Best Buy of the Month. One of the features we appreciated most was that we could hold opinions without anyone else knowing we had them. For example, if you wish to believe that the earth is chocolate flavoured, the Vikings discovered America but the CIA hushed it up or that certain racial groups should be pushed into large ovens, you can do so without giving it away. Well, until you start building huge ovens and employing staff who like wearing smart black uniforms, and then we're going to publicise a few opinions of our own, chiefly the ones concerning the rights of man. (We hope you'll come round to our point of view on that last one.)
There are lots of opinions on the net, because the net makes it so easy to invent a few and then "publish" them. Before the web, publishing used to mean circulating information for wider distribution. Now it seems to mean throwing up a few pages that the rest of the net can proceed to ignore. We can't honestly believe that the majority of home pages scattered throughout cyberspace like "a million points of light" are ever read by an audience wider than their own authors, and in some cases even that would appear an optimistic estimate. It's possible that Big Bubbles falls into the same category but then...it ain't nuthin' but a bubble anyway.
By now you've probably recognised that one vital element we have in abundance is words. We apologise now to the Beavis and Buttheads of the net who are sorely disappointed by the lack of clickable image maps, revolving menu bars and loopy GIFs employed in the construction of this site. Well, we would apologise but there's no point as they're unlikely to have read this far. Large amounts of content can be a distressing and unfamiliar experience on the web - indeed, we're not yet sure whether the latest versions of IE and Navigator support it - but we hope you'll persevere for the sake of the human intellect, a characteristic that we fear is being bred out of successive generations. Otherwise we'll all be communicating in grunts by 2050 and fighting over dog meat, and we don't mean the tinned variety.
Reading long tracts of text via your browser can be tiring. Try setting your default font to something sans serif like Helvetica or, better yet, print out the articles (on recycled paper, two pages per sheet please) and read them on the toilet (early trials with our focus group suggested that this is the ideal way to appreciate our material, provided the paper is soft enough).
Ettiquette dictates that we acknowledge a vast army of associates, relatives, influences and investors at this point, but we'll spare you all that. NTL:Home are currently hosting this site and, given that we're already slipping them twenty quid a month for the pleasure, we don't feel we owe them anything else. NTL have no responsibility for the content of this site and couldn't care less, unless someone threatens them with legal action over the content, in which case they'll probably back down and run away like a bunch of little girls.
Click on, Macduff.
