Modern day Hamlet

Death is everywhere. Death is in the stars. Death is in our hearts. Death is in our headlines, our houses, and our food. Thought you could crack open a “packet of cheese and onion crisps” without staring down at your inevitable mortality? That’s what Dorset, England’s Barry Selby thought, too. But he was majorly wrong.

Selby, a man in England who eats 42 packets of crisps (that’s chips for all the Americans out there) a week, thought he was having another average day of crisp-eating when he happened upon something unexpected but familiar: a skull-shaped chip to remind him that his time on this earth is impermanent. The Daily Mail has a brief interview with Selby wherein the man explained “‘I was shocked when I found it.”

Just as we all will be when death eventually strikes us down.

As a constant reminder of his mortality, Selby will keep the skull crisp on top of a computer in the front room, but he adds that he might move it to a protective box. Will he stare daily at the protective box as the skull crisp threatens his ability to properly function? Perhaps. But Selby is a lucky man, it seems. Death may be long off for him:

And it’s not the first odd-shaped snack he has come across - in the 1990s he found a crisp shaped like a 3D heart, which he kept for several years until it broke.