The Saddleworth Bubble Man

We had a little trip to Saddleworth today as there was some dinosaur shit going down at the museum, and Kerry gets excited at that kind of thing.  It was more of an interactive thing for kids really so we parked the trike in the museum and took piggy around the various stalls.  We panned for gold, well copper pyrite, and did some fossil hunting in a box of sand.  We then watched a demonstration of how a volcano works!  As the red bubbles ploughed down the side of the paper mache volcano and past a plastic dinosaur the lady explained that the only difference between this and a real one is that the lava would be really hot.  “Would it be hot enough to burn your face off?”, I asked publicly.  “Yes it would”, she confirmed.

After a light lunch we went to the park to see if the bubble man was doing his thing, and he was.  I like the bubble man, not only does he make massive bubbles but when it becomes too windy he busts the magic tricks out too.  As part of his repertoire he produced an empty paper bag and proceeded to do the Eric Morecambe, chuck something invisible in the air and catch it in the bag trick, and this brought back memories!

During the Gulf War I was part of the Desert Rats based in Al Jubail.  In our camp we had migrant workers who cleaned up around the place, a bunch of nice lads who spoke pigeon English and came from India.  They earned about £20’s a month and the majority of this was sent back home to help their families.  After eating a bag of crisps I did the trick to one of the cleaning lads and he went berserk.  He grabbed the bag off me and searched vehemently inside.  “AGAIN” he insisted.  I did it another time and once again he conducted the search of the bag for the invisible object.  This time he shouted for the other lads and before I knew it I had a crowd of about 20 migrant workers.  I did the trick for the crowd and it was like the scene from ‘Return of the Jedi’ when the Ewoks meet C3P0, I instantly became a God.

The bubble man wasn’t quite getting as much respect as I did but it still went down well.

On a separate note, whilst I was in Saudi, Big Vern and I decided to have a competition to see who could get the most letters from people during the time we were out there.  The prize would be 1000 Riyals, a month’s worth of extra pay for being at war.  We both put a lot of effort into winning.  I sent a shit load of blueys (free letters that people could send to British Forces personnel) to my brother and he passed them round his friends at school.  The majority of which I got back from Fat Otter, Simons friend, which simply contained profanities or pictures of nobs!  I also placed an ad in the local Cambridge paper and consequently got loads of letters from lonely women, all of which appeared to be proper nutters. 

Whilst we were coming to the end of our tour the Sergeant Major called the squadron together to communicate a complaint he had had from the RAF.  Apparently a number of people were getting far too much mail and this had to stop immediately.  There was a war on and this mail was taking up valuable space and unnecessary weight in the aircraft.  Anyone caught playing, as he put it, “Silly Bastards”, would be severely punished.

Fortunately that morning I was on duty to collect the mail from the RAF.  I collected 3 mail bags, one for the squadron, that was the smaller bag, and 2 larger bags, one for Big Vern and one for me!  I marginally won the competition and I gave my winnings to my favourite migrant worker, the one who inflamed my ego so much with the bag trick!

O, and we still won the war, so no harm was done!

"Lunch Pig"

"The Bubble Man"

"The Bag Trick"