Found! Blue Furry Cupcakes!
Thursday, June 3, 2010
Bookshops are always a distraction. So many things practically jumping off the shelves, clamouring for attention (and so rarely the thing you wandered in to look for). A trip last year to Kinokuniya, for a very specific purpose, led to much more distraction than I was expecting. And I should have known much better, as Kinokuniya has all sorts of interesting bits and pieces waiting to leap out at unsuspecting shoppers trying to be halfway purposeful on their lunch breaks (and failing miserably).
There are always stuffed animals of some kind or other in Kinokuniya, typically the Hello Kitty and cartoon character variety. But on previous visits, I’d never noticed round blue things that looked like a cross between an owl and a raccoon, that looked so soft and fluffy that you just had to pick one up. With frustratingly illegible labels, which gave no clue as to what on earth the round blue thing might be. Somehow, the temptation to get one for myself was resisted. But I still wanted to know what it was...
... and there, the troubles began...
Google is great when you know what you’re looking for. It’s slightly less useful (say, about as much help as a terrapin with the New York Times) when you have no idea what the thing you’re looking for actually is, and only a very muddled way of describing it. There are, it turns out, a lot of unlikely blue cartoon characters out there.
Then, while pootling with the kind of purposefulness that only procrastination can produce, success! There was a round grey animal that looked very like the round blue animal. And the round grey animal turned out to have a round blue friend.
The round blue creature was... a totoro. And once you’ve found out what it is, it’s amazing quite how many of them are out there...
... And equally amazing just what will inspire people baking cupcakes...
The mystery is solved, but not the wishfulness for a fluffy totoro of my own. Although the penguins might get jealous...
