A ‘Collage’ of Ignored Ads

If you lick the paper there is no particular taste. I wouldn’t say that it is salty but maybe just a tiny bit sweet. But not like ice-cream sweet. Just not salty enough to be salty. And, even though nobody talks about it, we all know how paper tastes like. We’ve all been there, curious enough to pop it inside our mouths ‘just to check’. Or, maybe, just because. And it melts. But it doesn’t melt like cheese or Wether’s candies. It doesn’t disappear into the nothingness of the palate, leaving behind the calories that will magically emerge and cover the front of the stomach. It separates. Disintegrate. And a piece becomes another ten and twenty and then more. The sweet - but not - taste disappears and the smaller pieces stay there, hiding in between the teeth and inside the cheek. Under there, where it touches the gums.

I used to think a lot about the taste.

Taste and paper.

Anyway.

It is something that I forgot about for quite a long time. Years, actually. And it came back to me only when I moved to London.

And this story is all about paper. And taste. Because those two concepts were often going on together in my mind. Together with a bit of curiosity and gluttony, to be completely honest.

I loved food since I was a child. This reciprocated feeling was so strong when I was a child that it made me look like a little bowling ball. Now, I managed to overcome that phase. But at the time – we’re talking almost twenty years ago – there was something that used to heat my passion even more. This might be a bit weird and it makes me a bit ashamed but I had a very overwhelming love for the advertising booklets. Magazines? Leaflets I guess would be the correct word. Those leaflets of five, ten, fifteen pages that someone would put inside our mailbox almost every day.

I’ve used to collect them all.

Kaufland’s, Auchan’s, Carrefour’s. A bunch of names that are not popular with the British audience but which were the giants of the polish market. Still are. Like Tesco or Asda. Gigantic shops in the eyes of a kid. Full to the brim with… Well, everything.

And there, on those small leaflets, they were trying to show off all of the products they had.

No, not all. The best. The cheapest. The fancies and the cheapest, affordable for everyone. The discounted strawberry chocolate which was my favourite and my mum’s favourite brand of soluble coffee. The gold one that smelled like toffee but absolutely didn’t taste like. And my father’s camembert which he’d eat every evening after dinner. He’d go with a knife to the fridge and cut a piece or two and made them disappear before reaching the entrance of the living room.

Since I remember I’ve always liked to make collages. But there wasn’t anything that I would love to cut more than the images of food out of the advertising leaflets.

Packed stuff was my favourite.

Chocolates, puddings, strange spices and tea. There were the Milka bars and Kinder Surprise or large boxes of crackers. Bread, buns, cereals and more buns. I loved buns. Especially the kaiser buns. And the hotdogs and cream cheese.

The companies would scream about their fantastic prices and huge discounts and I would just cut them out. I’d cut out the big, red numbers and flashing adjectives and would leave the product and its name. I didn’t care about the real… How can I say? Presence? Existence of the product on the shelf. Sometimes, but rarely, I would go to my parents and ask for something in particular that I might’ve seen in between the pages. But it wasn’t really about desire. It wasn’t about need. It was all about taste and the paper and the image. The connections that my mind would make. The idea and the ideal of the wander between the shelves. Or maybe something else which, to this day, I’m still not able to understand.

Might be.

The point is that my mum had to start to throw the cuttings away. I do not blame her now, I obviously had too much. But, then, she started a silent war. I’ve cut more and more and she, poor her, was trying her best to organise them for me and put them away. But then, inevitably, she had to throw them away.

I forgot about that. Well, maybe I told someone while having a pint together. A weird, childish thing.

But it did bring me a kind of satisfaction.

I don’t remember when I stopped. We moved at some point and I just stopped. I would look at the leaflets but I would leave my scissors inside my backpack, waiting for some more important assignments.

Then I moved to Italy. And then, years later, to London.

I don’t even remember why but I just remember that I was restless. I’ve been grocery shopping in the afternoon and I brought back with me one of those Asda’s magazines. I’ve sat down in the kitchen with a cup of coffee (not soluble) and started to flip through the pages. And now, it might sound weird, but I found it relaxing. Check the recipes. The new Heck’s veg sausages. Stuff.

A couple of days later I took out one of the agendas that I bought and never used. Well, maybe once or twice. One of those large ones, the A4 format ones. It took me a bit to find my scissors. And then I had to go out to buy some glue. But then there I was, almost twenty years later, finding a way to preserve my cuttings. A grown-up guy sitting at the table and cutting out and sticking in the packages of coffee from the advertising leaflets.

The paper tastes weird. And it’s not about the offers or claimed ‘quality’ of anything, really. It is the image that provokes something in my mind. It is the paper and the image. The sorts of connections that I can’t explain but which almost feel like memories. The apple juice that makes me remember my aunt’s garden and soft rabbit’s fur. The watermelon and puff pastry and the monotonous and calming sound of the train’s engine. A kind of familiarity and discovery that starts and finishes with food.

Yes, I’ve already said that there is some gluttony at the reins in here.

And many things changed and my ‘food journal’ isn’t how it would be years ago. I skip the meat. And the dairy. And all the stuff made with eggs. That is, of course, why there is not much left that I can cut out. But there’s been more in the last year and, hopefully, there will be more as time goes by. And there are some recipes in now as well since I consider myself grownup enough to be allowed near a stove.

But there it is. The same feeling of paper and satisfaction.

Different but the same.

Once a week - or once a month when life turns out a bit more hectic than it should be – I sit down in my room a reach out to my scissors which now are strategically placed right beside my computer. I reach for them and start to skim through my leaflet taking all the time that I need. My own time to unwind and enjoy the simplicity of the collage. Can I call it a collage? I don’t think so but, oh well.

This is the time that I cut out for myself. It doesn’t need a specific name.