This is a letter I (as Alison Tuvoices) wrote in 2003, and genuinely sent to KP Foods. I’ve always regretted not using a real name and return address. What did I think they would do? Hunt me down? Sue me? Sick the Space Raiders on me? They probably just smirked and then shredded the letter. The ‘fun facts’ mentioned in the letter now no longer appear on the backs of Space Raiders’ packets; they haven’t since 2010. What can I say, I’ve really got my finger on the pulse. Anyway, the cannibalisation continues… – Jamie

Dear Sirs

Space Raiders re: Intention to Sue

It is hard, in this day and age, to cushion your offspring from the horrors of the world. This task is made all the more difficult by sick companies such as yours (KP? What does it stand for? May I suggest ‘Killer Produce’?) with absolutely no regard for the sanctity nor the sanity of the consumers you seek to damage, exploit and murder. I thought my son was safe. I thought I’d done a good job of protecting him. Enter KP foods, stage left.

Just try to imagine my surprise when I returned home from a hard day’s work as a crack-whore to find my son lying in his bedroom amidst a nest of empty crisp wrappers, crying his eyes out but unable to stop himself from shoving clammy-handfuls of crisps into his fat gob!

‘What’s wrong, little Timmy?’ I asked. But Timmy is far from little, I can assure you. Thanks to the evil actions of your criminal empire, my eight year old son weighs as much as a couch. In fact, the whole suite.

‘It’s the aliens, mummy,’ he wailed, through a mush of crisps and a veil of tears. ‘I have to stop them!’

‘What on Earth do you mean, little Timmy?’ I asked. And that’s when he pointed at an empty bag of Space Raiders and implored me, through a glob of beef snacks, to read it and share his pain. And so I did.

Now, I am fully aware that you will know your own sickening mantra cum promotional evil off by heart, spawned as it was by your own vile and Hellish minds, but, in the interests of clarity, allow me to repeat it:

They came… From the darkest depths of the uncharted cosmos… THE SPACE RAIDERS Brightly coloured, bug eyed, bad guys with really big brains and easily enough technology to take over the planet. The only thing that can stop the Space raiders imminent invasion of the Earth is the sound of munchin’ crunchin’ snacks! So finish off this pack and go get another… before it’s too late!

Before it’s too late! So, in my Sumo-son’s effort to both save the known universe and stave off a multitude of panic attacks he has, to date, spent almost four and a half thousand pounds of his pocket money, my drugs-and-whoring money, and a great deal of my credit card limit on Space Raiders. To pour more salt (and, indeed, sugar) into the wound, he developed a form of diabetes so severe that he has to inject himself with insulin more times a day than I do myself with heroin.

What kind of a world is this we live in where people like you can warp the minds of impressionable youths and destroy their futures with complete and Satan-sealed impunity from prosecution? If only the torment had ended there! May I direct you to the ‘fun facts’ printed on each of the flavours of your disgusting product. Perhaps ‘Hellish facts designed to drag your weak and vulnerable children down deep into the fiery bowels of Hell to be disgorged and dismembered by the Lord Beelzebub himself’ would have been more appropriate, although I appreciate it probably wouldn’t fit on the packet.

Let me turn your attention to the ‘fun fact’ printed on the packet of your Beef flavoured ‘snacks’. It reads as follows:

ALIEN FUN FACT There is no such thing as a grey alien, in fact they are all bright colours, usually red, yellow, blue, green and purple. They only turn grey when you feed them with Beef-flavour snacks. So, go on, take the colour out of their faces and feed them as many Beef snacks as you can.

It may not take a vast leap of intelligence to see the relationship between cause and effect once I begin my heart-wrenching tale of horror. My crippled mother, moaning and gasping her last on her urine-soaked death-bed, let it be known that she wished to bequeath something to me that was very valuable to her. Unfortunately it was not her Bentley, as I had hoped, but something of an altogether more sentimental value. Since my mother has never given me anything but beatings and a strange fetish for silk stockings, you can imagine I was moved to tears by the old bitch’s intended legacy. She left me Geoffrey, her forty-five year old red, green, blue, yellow and purple parrot.

Are you a step ahead of me now, you evil swines? So, my demented son, believing Geoffrey to be a multi-coloured alien on a ruthless mission to enslave the human race, dutifully stuffed that feathered bastard full of five hundred and eighty-seven packets of Beef flavoured Space Raiders. And, do you know, much as your Beef-mantra predicted, Geoffrey did turn grey? He was fucking dead!

‘Mummy, the packet was right!’ Timmy cried, as I hit him with a snow-shovel.

To fill the void that Geoffrey’s terrible death had left in my heart, one of my Johns bought me a beautiful, fluffy Persian cat. I named it Cecil, after Cecil Parkinson. Perhaps I should have thought to consult, like some twisted Horoscope, the blurb on the back of your pickled onion snacks before welcoming another life-form into my home. May I direct you this time to the filthy pish you have splashed across the back of these Hell-snacks:

ALIEN FUN FACT Many people claim to have been abducted by aliens. This is a myth – Space raiders only abduct cats. They make them really fluffy, put little aliens inside their heads and then send them back to earth to spy on us…we call them Persian cats. You’ll never see a fluffy Persian cat eating Space Raiders snacks.

And so as I wandered out into the back garden to toss off my thoughtful John as a show of thanks, imagine my dismay at catching little Timmy bent over Cecil with a rusty hacksaw, the poor beast’s head lying meaowing and bloodied on the ground, as Timmy proceeded to slop out the goo inside.

‘But mummy,’ he said as I raised the spade, ‘he was one of them! He wouldn’t eat the Space Raiders!’

As Salt and Vinegar is my favourite flavour of crisps in the whole wide world I found it doubly difficult to accept that you could both warp my arsehole of a son even further and sully the good name of Salt and Vinegar at the same time. Since the ‘fun fact’ contained on this packet does not directly advocate the murder of animals, but instead opts to distort and violate the authority of Timmy’s history teacher {…they (the Space Raiders, of course!) built them (the sodding Pyramids!) out of bits of giant plastic and made them look very old just to confuse us humans!}, I’ll curtail my venom in this instance.

Suffice to say, Timmy was expelled for becoming unruly and hitting Mr Gilhouley in the ghoulies infront of the school bullies with a bottle of Dooleys he’d bought from Woolies, and now no other school will accept him because, and I quote, ‘…he is a complete piece of skum with the brain of an alcoholic maggot on acid.’ I’m quoting myself, of course.

I have since had to have my son put down. I hold you accountable for both the vets bill and a damage pay-out somewhere in the region of forty million pounds. I have arrived at this figure through consultation with my schizophrenic alter-ego, who assures me that the sum is a modest one given the circumstances. You will, of course, be hearing from my lawyer.

And you can tell the Space Raiders to expect a call as well. If they think they’re going to get away with this, they’ve got another thing coming.

Yours dementedly,

Alison Tuvoices

PS Tonight while you sleep I will suffocate your pets with a Bag-For-Life from Lidl’s. Incidentally, they’re only about thirty pence and are pleasingly durable. Worth a look the next time you’re popping in. Take care now.

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