The second time I've drawn sardines. This time it's internal. Too scared, seven years ago, was I of the insides, the mess, the spill-ability, and too attracted to the bold graphic colours of the covering cardboard box, I opted for just the packaging and now I opt for just the real thing. What it's like to enter into someone's home, to walk through their door and put together all that is that person. Known much more intimately now. Now that you observe their smells, their cleanliness, their preferences and what makes them most comfortable. Now exposed to their level of taste, of diligence, of intention and income. What's inside the home is for the dweller, not the rest of the world. Such is the opened can of sardines, packed neatly enough that the consumer can feel considered, but presented barren enough to know it's the taste that will be remembered, not its colours, not its illustrations. Judged on the way the oil has entered into its crevices and the way the skin can reflect the light that now envelops the once dark and preserved can. The sliding open of a tin is sexual. It's dangerous, a slipped finger can draw blood. It requires a delicate strength, a desire, a closed box that needs unravelling and devouring. The Portuguese Sardine. Like the Portuguese tart, like any food that represents, resembles and reminds us of a place, a season or a memory. Always tasting better when tasted on its native or adopted land. Even the options at the airport as you disembark your Ryanair flight taste richer, fuller and deeper than any fancy delicatessen from your home town. The box caught my eye first. Like a first date, on whose approach you notice their considered jeans and shoe combination, placing a decision on whether you like them or not before you get to know them at all. It was the box that I drew first. But after years of tasting, drawing and travelling to the lands that box the best foods, my come-to-Jesus moment was realising good packaging can tell a story and sell a product but it cannot emote the feelings nor the memory of the salivation from under your tongue as a new ingredient, a local flavour, hits your lips for the first exotic time. A hidden gem, from within an aluminium tin, consumed across the table or the rock or the beach towel or your child's pram and kept within our bodies for a period long enough to embed itself in our brains. And the packaging is disposed of. Give us what is inside. Open your tin, let me into your head, your bed and your bank of moments from shared meals in foreign places. Open your tin, for you and only you, and we can recall it someday in the future.