The Day I Gave up Pringles

Thirty years if a day! Thirty years of munching and chomping my way through various tubes of layered attractions only to find that as fast as one tube emptied another would fill its place; a juke box with only one song! I remember well the first time that I had a Pringle, that fateful day when I became hooked like a fish heading to the frying pan. I remember distinctly being thrown the remains of a tube of 'sour cream and onion' as some kid having noticed his mother tried to make a bid for freedom. And I grabbed the mysterious object, totally oblivious as to how this could change my life and completely unawares as to what I was actually doing. I opened the tube with a certain degree of awe and mystery (a feeling that has never departed each and every opening) and without hesitation I popped until the tube ran dry!

It has been hard. Many a times I have been shunned by mates who have not dabbled in a tube or two, been frowned upon and lectured to by those who have been there and escaped and I have been misunderstood by my family who feel that I have let the side down with my constant munching! Let me tell everyone of you that it is not easy to return back into the fold, to give up what has become the very essence and reason for getting up in the morning! Pringles became very early on the substance that turned the world for me! I found that I could not start off the day without a healthy wedge of Pringles in my stomach, that no day could end without the complete demolition of a hundred or more wedges congealing and feeding the deepest parts of my workings and soul for the night ahead.

By giving up I have not seen the light, the light has in fact been dimmed to the extent that it might as well be switched off. Even after three weeks of abstinence I have the urge, I cannot walk into a shop or supermarket without drooling uncontrollably to the consternation of many a customer and I have in fact this week taken to ordering food by phone just to prevent my accidentally ending up in front of a shelf filled with the evil missiles.

But it is without doubt the fond memories that I cannot put to rest. The time when I first met my wife over a packet of plain flavoured Pringles at Safeway's, she had one end and I the other of the last tube in the store. We ended up eating them together and have never looked back since (admittedly she divorced me last year as she said I was obese and obsessed with something or other)! Other times in the pub, a packet of Pringles in one hand a pint of bitter in the other - but I cannot look back anymore, I must look forwards and try to get over this stumbling block that I cannot pass by!

Then again I could just become a closet Pringles eater, nobody will know!

Ieuan Dolby
Author and Webmaster of SeaDolby.com
Copyright © Ieuan Dolby, 29th August 2005