ECCENTRICUS
ABANDON SHIP!
In 1876 explorers discovered natural occurring bubbles mysteriously rising from the seabed in the Atlantic, they were caused by an unknown oily substance that left multicoloured patterns on the surface of the sea, unfortunately it was considered unimportant and its location wasn’t fully recorded in the ship’s logs. In London, 1898, one of those explorers, an Arthur Parsington-Pears, after feasting on a nine course meal including wine returned drunkenly home and instructed his maid to prepare his bath, further asking and winking to be ‘treated like a dirty shirt’. The maid innocently responded by adding potash, soda and a little tallow to his bath as one would when washing clothes, agitating it into froth with a wooden dolly to create soap suds thus making the first ever bubble bath. Arthur, still drunk, was unable to see the bath through the suds and fell headlong into the tub, his flailing added to the bubbles but also gave him an immensely curiously pleasing frisson of excitement from the warm foamy embrace that made him stand upright in a eureka moment exposing himself to the maid and shouting “By jove! If only I could bottle this bathing fun!” he then passed out awakening face down and staring at oily, multicoloured patterns on the bathroom floor. His memories of the strange discovery in the Atlantic returned. Adding bubbles to soap was time consuming and costly, employing hundreds of workers to blow through small narrow tubes into large vats, Arthur had indeed stumbled years earlier on the soap world’s Holy Grail; free soapy aeration, and set out to rediscover the location. For 14 years he tried to raise the funds for a new expedition but failed so instead he did the next best thing and thought ‘bollocks to this’ instead purchasing a first class, all expenses paid ticket on the fastest ship in the Atlantic, the brand new and unsinkable Titanic. On the 15th April, 1912, Arthur was stood behind Jack and Rose with arms outstretched on the bow of the Titanic enjoying the clear night sky when he spotted bubbles. He couldn’t believe his eyes and turned to Jack excitedly, whispering ‘Paint me like a French tart, I feel frisky’ just before a two hundred foot iceberg slammed into the ship. The Titanicus Giganticus Britannicus hated its underwater soapy bath time being disturbed by what it called sightseers and purposely pushed an iceberg in the way of the Titanic, ‘I love playing with rubber ducky but all these ships are taking it too far’ it explained many years later to a local newspaper about the tragedy, ‘Anyway, it had a hole in it.’ It concluded before purchasing a new sponge and returning to the depths of the sea.
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