During the early months of the Covid-19 pandemic, while scientists tried to find a vaccine, life was suspended, we stayed at home.  The people we lived with became our ‘family bubbles’, we felt safe inside, and warm.  In time we were allowed out to meet others as long as we stayed outside, and we developed broader, ‘friendship bubbles’; in the cold winter evenings, we’d wrap ourselves in blankets, and huddle around fires to talk about good films we’d seen.        

We were the lucky ones:  some ‘family bubbles’ were fraught and tense, prisons of entrapment. Telephone numbers and code words were set up to try and offer lifelines to those suffering in seclusion.  If they’d been wrapped in blankets and huddled around a fire on a freezing winter’s night, it would be because they’d managed to escape their bubbles of distress and could now maybe start to talk about the dreadful place they’d been.        

If one thing is certain, it’s that a bubble will pop.  What is uncertain, is when.  We may not see it, we may not hear it, but the fragile bombshell squirms, the surface tension weakens, and then… the liquid falls, the bubble dies.  One door shuts, another door opens.