Which led me to wonder – or “got me to thinking” I might say,
if this was “Sex and the City” and not “Oh Dear. How Sad. Never Mind.” – why are
there empty packets of this low-price, corn snack in my back garden?
And outside Tancred’s nursery?
And – in fact – every damn place I ever look, why is there a
discarded pack of Space Raiders?
They say that in London, you are never more than 6 feet away
from a rat. I’m not sure if this is true. It would probably be true if you
substituted “a rat” for “a dickhead”.
Well, I would hypothesise that between you and the rat – or dickhead
– there is at least one screwed-up, indestructible, radioactive-smelling bag
with a picture of an alien on the front of it, which the rat (dickhead) is
avoiding.
They’re everywhere. I can feel those over-sized, black,
almond-shaped eyes on the back of my neck right
now.
I have two theories about this.
The first is sociological.
- Premise 1: Space Raiders are the crisp of preference for the sorts of people who throw empty crisp bags on the floor.
- Premise 2: Space Raiders are cheap.
You may be wondering how, unless I handle these empty crisp
bags – which is, to me, only marginally less revolting a prospect than handling
discarded underwear – I know this.
Well, I did actually Google Space Raiders this morning. That’s
the problem with the internet. You come up with all these ideas about what
things might be and why they might be, then you Google it and you find out the
truth (or something like the truth).
It is the death of the imagination and of memory, when you
can just find out the reasons for something or what something you half-remember
was really like with a few keystrokes.
Marcel
Proust would have had literally nothing to do with his life if he’d lived
in the internet age. He could have just Googled “Madeleine smell” and got four
million results.
Anyway, I disgress. I learned from the Space Raiders Wikipedia page
that they are:
“A British cheap snack food, intended to fill the same niche market as crisps”
Which seems to the untrained eye an unnecessarily cautious
description.
So Space Raiders are cheap and are eaten by people who drop
litter. You do not see anywhere near as many discarded packs of, say, Waitrose
Hand Cooked Sea Salt crisps.
Get to the point: Space Raiders are prole feed. They are
eaten by people for whom a tracksuit is formalwear and whose bin is the great
outdoors.
Malevolent little eyes... |
Space Raiders packs are not the abandoned containers for
low-cost crisp-style corn snacks AT ALL.
They are in fact an invasive species of fungus or algae with
astonishing powers of mimicry.
Stay with me. Let’s assess the evidence (you will by now be familiar with what I call "evidence"):
- No one I know or who you know has ever eaten any.
- No one knows how they got where they are.
- No one is willing to touch or remove them to find out once and for all if they are what they appear to be.
I believe that back in the 1980s Space Raiders were a real
brand of crisps, featuring cartoon intergalactic pirates and shit like that.
Natural selection has favoured members of this invasive species which
encourages people to leave it alone – and so they have grown gradually to
resemble the most unpleasant kinds of litter, re cheese-stink plastic bags.
They’re an algal bloom, spring from the contaminated earth
like a red tide.
That alien face is the plant world’s crude attempt to replicate the appearance
of a Monster Munch monster – and it has succeeded to the degree that no one
wants to look closer as soon as they have established what they think they’re
looking at.
Do not touch, or it may release its spores in your face |
I find it astonishing that mainstream science has not
recognised this. We are all in terrible danger. Space Raiders are coming.
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