Quite a handful
(Hand brand peanuts: Singapore)
Sometimes I like to trawl through my older photos in the hope that I forgot to tell you about something. There are masses of images of time spent in Singapore and Bali in January and February but I’m aware that many of my western counterparts don’t want to watch me having extended fun somewhere hot when the UK is still breezy freezy. This however is one of the items I remember as being distinctly interesting. Crossing all boundaries, the packaging really says it all. “This is a bag of great peanuts”. I tried my best to make the exact same motion with my hand as on the packaging, but either my hand differs from the model’s hand considerably or it may have been drawn in a slightly odd way. I was delighted to notice that my thumbs were long in comparison to the hand on the bag – I appear to be in possession of an extremely short set of digits with minute thumbs. My toes at least match.
Chinese (or in this case possibly Singaporean) food packaging commonly features an image like this with either an animal, person’s face or other logo inside. I found that food and the more popular medicated products; creams, shampoos, some medicine, often featured the founder or current sponsor of the product on the label. As a westerner in Asia, it was quite disconcerting to see a large, balding Asian man on a wrapper for cough sweets or biscuits. I feel similarly about the hand. It is so large as to take up just as much space as the peanuts, being half actual life size. Along with the pleasing assonance of hand brand, I have to commend the designers on the simple fact that there is no way of confusing the hand brand with any other. There was so much food surrounding me when I was in Singapore this year that it was only comparable to Christmas or a decadent birthday. Unfortunately I never managed to find stomach space to sample the peanuts, however highly recommended by the packaging.
In other news, I went to my first pub quiz this week after a long absence from the fray. I love a quiz and pride myself on having a smattering of knowledge about a myriad of subjects. It was a great return to form with our fantastic foursome team, ‘the unfeasibly normal jumpers’ (or something idiotic like that) coming a very solid second place. No winnings, unfortunately, but perhaps next week. We spent most of the quiz’s duration fighting off the neighbouring table, a group of (let’s be kind) middle-aged men who were mocking us for our slow answering. They spent the time between every round questioning us on each aspect of the round – what had we answered, would we ever catch up to their fantastic score, were we all students? By the end, we became so fed up with their incessant cajoling that we began to verbally and (gently) physically push them away. Anyway, they pitied us and said they might share their winnings with us, yet after their fifth place defeat, by us as well as three other teams they had to concede that we had been the better team. By the time they left the pub, they had consumed several pints each and swore to ‘batter us’ next week. I hope they meant figuratively rather than actually, but either way, I’m not particularly frightened. Next week, we might be good enough to win. £125 could be ours. We will not be sharing it with our neighbours, ‘the boxers’.
– Today Rosie is running riot somewhere in Glasgow, Scotland –
