Tag: shoppinglist

The Shopping List(s!)

Ermagerd! Ermagerd! More lists??

It was bound to happen, wasn’t it? Give someone a tiny bit of attention or exposure and it goes to their head. They start getting wild ideas and before you know it, they’ve lost their marbles, throwing their art around all over the place and up your nose.

No apologies, but thanks to the suggestions of many, I decided to leave another list laying about. My youngest is enjoying all the fun that ‘The Shopping List’ has brought, and enthusiastically left Shopping List No.2 (or S.L.2) in a Trolley on Fri 30th March. We waited. And waited. Nothing. Zilch.
‘Ho-Hum’, we thought as the week drew on and forgot about it. But, (unlike the first list), we remembered to take a photo before we went shopping. There’s a pic further down of S.L.2 (I missed a trick there, I should have drawn a reference to ‘On a Ragga Tip‘* or something.
*(opens in new tab)

So, did we give up? No! Sunday (2nd Apr) saw the Pickle family off to Tesco again, same Tesco as the previous 2 shopping lists. We do shop there a lot and have done for well over 25 years. It’s a good Tesco.

This time, I wrote the list whilst sitting in the car, as Vikki did the fuel, so tried a different ‘style’ of shopping list. This time, I tried to incorporate all of the items in the list into one coherent picture, nearly managed it too, but later, noticed I’d forgotten the baked beans in the drawing!)

This particular Sunday didn’t require a trolley, so I had a basket on my lap and was in charge of the list. When we got to the till, the plan was to leave it in the basket for a lucky Tesco employee to find and brighten their hard working day.

Oops.
When we got to the tills, I remembered that I hadn’t taken a photo of the list. Panicking and hoping I wasn’t noticed, I carefully used my phone (which was luckily ready to use for the clubcard – phew!) I was sweating and nervous at this point. As my finger clicked on the button, the phone made a noise and the photo was taken. I hastily flipped over the list and took another.

No-one saw. I felt the adrenaline as I dropped the list into an empty basket in a pile of similar baskets. Mission accomplished. I breathed a sigh of relief and helped pack the shopping.

We went home, even consumed some of the things on the shopping list for tea/supper. Then, almost immediately forgot about the list again.

Until today! My son’s mate’s mum, Claire, works at the same Tesco, and she knows about the first S.L. and has been following it’s fun progress. This morning, she WhatsApp’ed the Mum’s n Dad’s group “Thanks.” (see below)

Claire’s W.A. message : with Danni – “Well Chuffed” – Holding S.L.3.

Woo and Yay, Houpla and Huzzah! *Drumroll*………. The S.L.3. has been found!

It was found by ‘Danni’. I’m not fully aware of all the details as to it’s discovery, or subsequent adventures, but I have been assured Danni was ‘Well chuffed‘ and the list is ‘living on our work desk now‘. That has made my week! Thanks to Danni and Claire for letting me know!

Here’s S.L.3. Before ‘the drop’. (Note the tesco floor as I secretly took the pic)

shopping list with a pig, punting a chicken along the river on a bread and butter raft as a carrot runs free on the bank of the river..

SL3 – Front:
The Third Shopping List; With a pig, punting a chicken along the river on a bread and butter raft as a carrot runs free on the bank of the river..

No baked beans were hurt in the making of this list. Because I forgot to draw them.

SL3 -Back:
Featuring a Chook from the future.

And, because I like to spoil you…. Here’s
SL2: ‘The Second List – Missing presumed binned’.

Title – S.L.2. – On a Shopping Trip.

Grapes on the beach on a hot day in California.

Happy cherries.

Pizza – Being eyed up by Leonardo TMNT. – All 3 kids did something awesome recently, so nicer pizza than usual as a little reward (amongst others during the Easter break), they’re good kids and deserve it!

Milk – obvs.

Sugar – Sing-along-if-you-know-it – Made famous by the inventors of said substance, ‘The Archies’, a band from yesteryear (1969 -The summer of sugar), not only discovered sugar whilst mountaineering in Holland, but also sang a song about it and how, after comparing it to honey, realised the similarities and really liked the results.

Ready Salted Crisps – or ‘plain’ crisps. It’s worth remembering that the crisps we consume were once beautiful, free-range potatoes, foraging for food and roaming the landscape of countries like Ireland, England, Jersey and the Serengeti. Sometimes hunted for their skins, sometimes hunted for their flesh. Makes you think, doesn’t it? I don’t know what about.

Kiwi Fruits – I couldn’t bring myself to draw Kiwi-Knackers. So I censored it and cleverly got away with it. It doesn’t look much like a Kiwi, but you’re too pre-occupied thinking of testicles to notice.

Recycled – Of course. I won’t be cutting any trees down to write a shopping list. Apart from the impossiblility of carrying around a tree whilst shopping, I’d be overflowing with old envelopes, they’d stack up and up, then I wouldn’t be able to go shopping, or leave the next list somewhere, because my house will be full of envelopes that could have been recycled. I would be trapped.

Fbook address to pickledpizza.art – I decided to put a way of finding me/ contacting me to save the ‘ i found this, does anyone know who did it’ part – I loved it first time, but I think some people might just bin it or be negative if I keep being anonymous.

SL2 – The Back

P.T.O. – You’d be forgiven for presuming or assuming that P.T.O. stands for Please Turn Over, but it’s a common misconception. It actually stands for Page Transformation Organisation. Founded some time ago, The Page Transformation Organisation or ‘Patranorgan’ for short, discovered, during routine experiments in page-transformation that test subjects were observed losing concentration very rapidly, often turning over the whole page before getting to the end of the Header, which simply read: “P.T.O. – Organised but Transformative Page Research and development.”
Further tests revealed that just the initials of the organisation was enough to make even the tallest test subjects turn the page involuntarily.

To this day, P.T.O can be seen on shopping lists and tattoos across the world. Apart from the countries that don’t use the letters P, T or indeed, O. They have other symbols and letters for that.




Chook – A lovely chook from the future.





Disclaimer – As someone on the KentOnline article said that it is littering to leave a shoppinglist in a trolley by accident may be delighted to know that I’ve decided not to do it accidentally, as this is littering. So I’ll do the opposite, because leaving them deliberately is art, for free, as a donation to the good people of Thanet.

Smiley – It’s a smile. we all need those as much as possible.

Where next?

Who knows where? Who knows when? Perhaps subscribe to find out the next thrilling instalment! Thanks for reading and keep smiling when you can, it’s infectious and fun.

So this thing happened….

Hello. If you’re here for the first time, thank you for popping by, I appreciate it more than you realise. You may be thinking, ‘He doesn’t post very regularly on his website, does he?’

If you’re revisiting, I also really appreciate your visit, but you’re probably thinking, where has he been? Why neglect your website for so long?

Let me explain,

I am getting old. I am fast approaching 50 and as the years move steadily on, I have let my negativity and mental health dictate my creativity/humour. So, no website visits meant keeping this site up-to-date became less of a priority. It’s a bit sad, but as far as encouragement/inspiration/lunacy were concerned, lack of interest in the site meant lack of interest from me. I just don’t seem to go anywhere.

In my defence, as a family, we’ve had to endure some hard knocks over the past 4 years or so and although I haven’t stopped drawing, or being silly whenever possible, the blackness of depression has been uncontrollable and random, sometimes knocking me back during my best times and making me doubt everything, even give up altogether. I also suffer with anxiety, although there seems to be a lot of that about recently, I mean it, the older I get, the worse I worry but not without cause, I actually do have a lot to worry about.
(I’ll blog in detail one day, but suffice it to say, that with 3 kids, (one of which is an adult), all with health problems of their own, coupled with with my own and my wife’s, it’s not just worrying about nothing*).

(strawberry from The Shopping List – See next blog post for details)

Anyway…..

I’ve done a lot of thinking recently and I’ve decided to stop stopping. It’s a nasty, vicious, pointless cycle;
Make art, post art, try a project to make money, project fails, start new project, get dejected, get ill, stop.
then something like halloween or Xmas pops up and it’s back to the sart of the cycle again.

So from now on, I’m breaking the cycle. I’m working on how to structure my time so I don’t hyper-concentrate at the detriment to other platforms. For example, I’ve ignored this site, because of a lack of traffic, but still post on my Facebook page (pickledpizza.art) and last year, ignored instagram because Tik-Tok was doing well.

I haven’t a clue how other people juggle all the platforms when they only focus on one product, so being a diverse artist with several mediums makes the whole thing even more messy. For years now I’ve hunted the solution to have a portfolio website that’s easy to upload to, but has enough sub-categories to cover photography, portraits, digital, vector, craft, facepaint, crving, pyrography, inkwork, tattoo design, text art, poetry, photo-manipulation etc etc etc.

But what did you mean, this thing happened?

Well, the reason I’m back, hopefully from this point onwards is the culmination of my working out how to be in all places at once and a determination to battle my mental health, coupled with a tiny** burst of recognition on Facebook, thanks to a shopping list.

Shopping List?

Well, every now and again in my life, something random might see a piece of art thrust into the limelight, sometimes deliberately sometimes by accident. On Sun 26th March, I doodled on a shopping list, something I sometimes do to make my wife or kids laugh whilst they shop and my wife left it in the trolley.

Next Time… The Shopping List – The Unfolding Story of a Folded Envelope

In my next blog, I’ll explain this event in more detail but this simple shopping list has made the events leading up to now, to make me channel what I do, which sometimes makes people laugh, to stop chasing my tail aimlessly and keep on keeping on.


*I also worry about others, some of which are far worse off than myself.
**this could be relative. Tiny so far, Tiny in comparison, or Tiny sarcastically. Time will tell!