大象传媒

Wasn't it great the way paint on front doors used to swell up in blisters? It's years since I've seen a blistered front door. Paint nowadays must be treated with some sort of ingredient which makes it blister-proof.

As kids we loved sneaking up and puncturing any bubbles we could find. First of all you had to pinch a needle or a pin from your mammy's sewing box. This was difficult. I don't know how they did it but the mammies in those days seemed to know exactly how many pins and needles they had at any given time. The sewing boxes themselves were miraculous items. Toffee tins or
chocolate boxes saved for the purpose. The great thing was the smell lingered. So if you didn't have a halfpenny for a chewy toffee you just stuck your nose in the box and sniffed. It was enough to set your palate raving. Of course we were forbidden to pinch pins and to pop paint bubbles, especially the ones on the front doors. People were very fussy about their front doors. They liked to make fancy patterns with graining combs and everyone tried to compete with the neighbours. Those blisters were irresistible. If you thought you had a good chance of getting away with it, you took a good dekko around the place to see if a grown-up was lurking and then you stabbed. Grown-ups were sneaky articles. You could never be sure of them. They hid behind curtains and furniture just to catch you doing what you were expressly forbidden to do. If they caught you, likely as not, it would be a few swishes about your legs with a set of vicious tawse. Mostly we were inclined to risk all for the sheer ecstasy of stabbling into paint blisters.
We kept scores too and, as well as paint, we had a go at tar bubbles.

On hot days, tar on roads melted. It was obvious when you had been dabbling in tar. The evidence was all over your white socks and bare legs. Butter would remove it but it seemed an awful waste of butter at a time when the ration was a couple of ounces per week. It sounds vile but I remember some of my friends gouging out bits of tar and chewing it. I cannot see how, but they insisted it made their teeth whiter. If that were the only effect, they were lucky. Personally, I don't remember being tempted to copy them.

With such an addiction to bursting blisters and bubbles it seems like rough justice that I should commence work in the office of a paint manufacturing firm when I grew up. Hard gloss, flat paint, red lead, undercoating, distemper amd creosote were a few of the descriptions I typed on the firm's invoices. They also had a tar boiling department where bituminous paint bubbled, blistered and popped all day long. It was a witch's great cauldron and the fellow in charge was known as the King of the Tar Boilers. He wore navy-blue overalls and they were always covered in splashes of tar. It was so hot in that department, the tar boiling emporor was constantly lathered in sweat. Unfortunately the only time I got to see the tar boiler in action when I had to chase into the factory to pass telephone messaages along to my boss. For an ex-blister popper, it was maddening. There were masses of bubbles in action and no way could I touch one of them. That erea of my life could be described as a time when the bubble finally burst.