The Holy Grail Crisp Packet

Alan McCormick / Jonny Voss



By a lone angular house, the search was on for the lost Holy Grail crisp packet, containing the lost million pound token. It had been mislaid by a disconsolate fatlegged soul called Edward the Banana (Banana on account of his liking for peelable yellow fruit). Edward searched high and low for his crisp packet —banana flavoured—and enrolled his pal, Frisbee Pete, to help him. Frisbee Pete was not much help and threw his frisbee wildly into gusts of wind, and then chased it; forgetting that he was really there to help his friend, Edward the Banana, in his crisp packet quest.

Events were being monitored and recorded by a local reporter, Whispering Wilhelm, with an old fashioned, retro chic, Russian box camera. He whisperingly encouraged Edward the Banana to look desperate and sad, photographing him walking towards a selection of crisp packets in anxious expectation, and then taking shots of him picking them up with an expression as woeful as a down-trodden circus clown.

Whispering Wilhelm was of German extraction and harboured ambitions to be a great photographic artist. Recording the local story of a man in search of a prize winning crisp packet was small fry to him. To try and produce something more profound and universal for humanity, he sought to push Edward the Banana to his psychological limit. He whispered obscenities and jibes like a paparazzi photographer trying to provoke a marketable, excruciating reaction from his prey. When he whispered to Edward the Banana that he was a 'banana loving fool, incapable of even securing a crisp packet safely on his person', he provoked a reaction he couldn't have bargained for.

Edward the Banana began a speech: 'Please, enough is enough, Wilhelm. I am not a pawn in your photographic game. I am flesh and blood: if you prick me, I seep real blood; if you say an unkind thing, then I bleed inside. Both are painful, I can tell you. I am a mere mortal soul in need of kindness and understanding in an hour of need. Please do not take any more photographs. Lay down your wicked tools and your cruel words and let me breathe . . .'

His speech continued long into the night and by the end of it, Whispering Wilhelm was a changed and better man. He put away his camera, and hugged Edward the Banana as if he were some kind of messiah. This Damascean moment of epiphany in the cynical German photographer also had a profound effect on Edward the Banana. He realised that, perhaps, his search for the lost crisp packet and the million pound token was a waste of time. He meant this in the deepest sense, for he also realised that he was losing his humanity, his sense of self, in the search: he would need to stop feeling cheated and sorry for himself, and carry on his life as if he had never had the crisp packet in the first place. To this end, he invited Wilhelm, no longer known as 'Whispering', in a game of frisbeethrow with his good friend Frisbee Pete.

The three men threw, chased and caught the frisbee until they could no longer see it. They were exalted and energised, and laughed freely and uproariously throughout their game. When the frisbee dropped over a wall into a nettled wasteland beyond the lone angular house, they couldn't find it, and shrugged their shoulders and went home. They would not have known therefore, that it landed on top of the Holy Grail crisp packet. The packet would remain hidden until an army of junk food eating ants took shelter from a rainstorm, where they enjoyed a much needed supply of potato snack food before going on their way.




© Alan McCormick / Jonny Voss

imageABOUT THE ARTISTS
Jonny Voss creates the pictures and Alan McCormick writes the words. The excerpts from Dumpsters were inspired by summer walks around Vauxhall and Walthamstow in search of discarded objects. Recent collaborations are even more accidental but like all their work share a desire for spontaneity and impulsiveness. They are also working on an illustrated children's book, Udo's Search for the Two Colins.

Alan McCormick's fiction has been widely published and an assortment of his stories have appeared previously on Dogmatika, whilst you are likely to see Jonny Voss's pictures every day, on billboards and in shops—you can discover more at Jonny Voss.com. Further McCormick & Voss collaborations can be found in Volume Magazine 2 and on Dead Drunk Dublin.