I Want To Be A Simba Chippie

Even potato crisps have a voice, although some of them are still trying to find theirs....

 Harvesting machines are seen to be collecting large numbers of potatoes from a field, in a film advert that ran in our local cinemas years ago. In the background a catchy jingle plays, 'I Want To Be A Simba Chippie!...I want To Be A Simba Chippie! sung by the potatoes, who are happily anticipating their new lives away from the farm. I've often wondered (which may make you wonder about me), how did the potatoes know they wanted to be Simba chippies?

One little potato doesn't make it. I think he tumbles off the truck or arrives too late for the harvesters. Anyway, the camera zooms in on his crestfallen face as he watches his friends drive off into the distance.

"Aaah, I wanted to be a Simba chippie too."

Well I mean! How does he know? I've often wondered ....... what happened to this forlorn little potato? Did he just lie there and rot away? Did he re-root and try to be a Simba chippie again the following year? Did he re-route and become a Willards chip instead, or was he destined for something else? Did he become a bullet for a child's potato gun, fodder for swine, mash for a starving family? If he wasn't able to re-root or re-route, did he let go of his aspirations to be a crisp with ease, or did he cling to his plans until he became soft and wrinkled? What thoughts and feelings and emotions went through that little potato? Did he go into extreme denial and sing, 'I'm a lonely little petunia in an onion patch' or did this lonely little potato finally, after plummeting through all prescribed layers of grief, submit to the way things are..."I am a potato."

And what of his friends - do they actually know that they want to be crisps, (Simba crisps nogal!) or are they seduced by hearsay? I'd understand if the potatoes were butterflies that, through a natural process of metamorphosis, become what they are. I mean its not like caterpillars wake up in the morning and sing a jingle, "I want to be a wing-ed insect, I want to be a wing-ed insect!" It's likely that caterpillars just wake up feeling hungry and things progress from there without any thought on the caterpillars' part about what happens next.

So I've concluded, from my wonderings and personal life wanderings that the potatoes think they want to be chippies, but that they don't actually know it. Maybe, for our potato friends, landing up as celebrity chippies isn't all it's cut out to be. Maybe they discover - if they live to tell the tale - that there are better things in life than being deep fried and vacuum packed. Maybe they wake up to find that being masticated by a pimply-faced teenager or a fat-fingered fellow, or trodden underfoot at Fantasyland isn't what they imagined the life of a chippie to be. Maybe they go on to realise that if they could choose again, they'd choose to be potatoes.

Which brings me to wonder ....... do you think you want to be a Simba chippie, or do you already know you're a potato?

Let's speak again just now*

*South African time meaning soon-soon, later, whenever

**Simba - A leading brand name for potato crisps
***Willards -A leading brand name for potato crisps

****nogal is an Afrikaans word that defies description. Its prounced no-(or)-g-(sound of an angry cat hissing)-al-(ul)