I notice out of the corner of my caustically squinted eye that Valentine’s Day has swung past again, distributing a sickly saccharine dose to the veins and with invisible pink hands coercing all those with lover-friends to buy cards and eat meals and smile and have a face.
Valentine’s Day is a hideous occasion for many reasons, but, mostly, it is a hideous occasion because it is a prime contributor to the problem that is The Balloon. It isn’t pointed out enough – at all, in fact – just how rubbish balloons are. So I’m going to say it again, because repetition works. Balloons are rubbish. They are utterly, utterly rubbish. As I’m sitting here, typing this, I can feel myself getting angry about just how rubbish balloons are; and even more angry about the fact that nobody realises it.
Perhaps it is the quaint image of the happy child, ice cream in one hand, balloon in the other – etched so deep in the consciousness of the human race – that has prevented us from seeing balloons for the awful, pointless things they are. What you don’t think about when that idyllic picture springs to mind is what happens when the child accidentally lets go of the balloon and it bumbles off into the sky in a kind of annoying, sporadic, almost-coming-down-so-you-can-reach-it-again-but-never-quite-gettting-there way, and as you lunge for it you spill your ice cream all over your favourite Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle T-shirt, and the pain of the loss of cold, glutinous scoops of vanilla, compounded by the fashion calamity that is the cream-speckled faces of Donatello and Michelangelo is so great that it makes you want to scream until blood comes out and you can roll about in it in the grass kicking your feet and screaming an impromptu song with lyrics about how terrible balloons are.
But, my (actually quite pleasant) childhood aside, the point has to be further stated. At parties, where balloons make their most common appearances, festooning the doorways, nooks and, of course, crannies of our living-holes, they are inevitably wrenched from the wall by drunken fingers during the dirty hours and batted about a few times.
A drunken person possesses the ability to make even the most horrible pursuit fun. Talking when drunk? Fun. Dancing when drunk? Fun. Cleaning up a slick of your best friend’s vomit while an aesthetically-challenged affiliate of the opposite sex attempts to help you while surreptitiously manufacturing the physical contiguity of your faces? Fun, fun, fun. Even if you watched Moulin Rouge when you were drunk it would probably seem quite fun.
But give a drunken person a balloon to bat around and I guarantee they will find it fun for a sum total of three seconds. Throwing and catching is a much neglected and noble hobby and does not deserve to be diluted into a farce through adoption of the balloon as a viable game-object.
Balloons are never fun, yet, like Tony Blair, they are able to trick us repeatedly that they are able to provide an adequate service. It is imperative that just as we say, “No, Tony, you are an infelicitous facilitator of my needs as an ethical human,” we also say, “No, Balloon, I will not be tricked again by your beguiling tumescent shape and gloss finish. I see no joy in your bulbous curves and dismiss you thus”.
So next time you have a party, lose the balloons and bring in the bubbles. They provide a vastly superior service to the balloon, including an emotionally resonant transience and glimmering rainbow visuals.
I urge you to spurn balloons – buy bubbles.
