Baking Soda

For some reason, submarines have recently started to feature in the iconography of these assemblages. I originally attributed this to having visited the Anselm Kiefer exhibition, and re-wakened memories of the TV series Das Boot, but there is probably more to it than that.  After all, a submarine is the very embodiment of an item bobbing up from the subconscious.  Though, as Freud might have said, sometimes a submarine is just a submarine.

If you are old enough you will remember those little plastic submarines that came as a "free gift" with a box of breakfast cereal -- Corn Flakes, I think, or possibly Shreddies.  The idea was that by putting baking soda into a little compartment beneath the sub, the thing would rise and fall in a bottle of water.  As we never had any baking soda in the house -- my mother was not a keen cook -- I never did get to try this out.  Besides, I thought the fat black plastic plug that sealed the compartment spoiled the lines of the craft, and usually discarded them.

As these tiny submarines were usually yellow, I have always assumed that they lurk somewhere beneath that single appalling blot on the otherwise immaculate and only truly enduring Beatles album, Revolver.  Though, oddly, no-one has ever suggested this, as far as I know.  It may be in Revolution in the Head somewhere, but I have never been able to open that tome without wishing I hadn't.  I gave it away to Oxfam last year, along with Lipstick Traces, Lights Out For The Territory, and various other unrewarding fat volumes I shall never read again.  I need the shelf space.