Reading the signs

I went to put some marmalade on my toast this morning and found a little hidden message on the inside of the lid. Quite apt for the moment, as it happens.

It got me thinking about how I am a reader. I’ll read anything and everything and wherever I am if there are words to be seen, I’ll be reading them, intentionally or not. It’s just what we do, isn’t it? No wonder that during my teacher training, during the discussion of encouraging children to read, the cereal box was highlighted as a great opportunity.

Reading the inside of the marmalade jar lid made me look of other, “hidden” messages around. How funny that this booklet from the Ooni 3 we used the other day was still on the worktop - a mere coincidence that we’ve got a couple of nice pizzas for supper tonight.

My Hero’s mug was being a bit mean, however, emphasising the faint remains of an entry on our calendar which was erased a few weeks ago. Yes, we should have been in Egypt today, heading for Safaga and Luxor tomorrow to stay overnight and visit all the places we’ve had on our list since….

…we sailed almost that same itinerary in 2008, evidenced in a book of photos there on our bookshelf and when I took the feature photo for this post of the Coke can with words I couldn’t read. On that occasion, we chose to explore Cairo and the Pyramids rather than the Valley of the Kings and we’d been looking forward to revisiting some of the same ports a second (or in some cases, a third) time. But it wasn’t to be; because as the adjacent book title suggests, “The Way we Live now” is rather different from what we were expecting.

As I sat editing photos and writing this post, however, my eyes fell on another little bit of printed material which has been clipped to that great postcard from Switzerland for a few years. I think it originated in a fortune cookie, but was it ever more apt?