Well with one day
to go to surgery I got thinking about what made me the man I am today. Was it
chocolate: nope, hate the stuff and would happily see it banned for no other
reason that it would piss some people off (I’m like that at times!). Was it
booze? Nope again. While I can drink, I don’t as frankly the taste is normally
nasty and the headache I get after only a few slips simply isn’t worth it.
Also, its much more fun watching people get drunk and acting the fool, than you
be the fool yourself.
How about
snacking? No again, I don’t really do that. I do have a nasty habit of eating
while preparing food though, something which has been cured to a degree by CBH
taking over the cooking duties in our house after 20 years of leaving it to me.
No, my down fall
comes from chips….. yes that’s right, the MIGHTY CHIP. All hail to the deep
fried potato. Let’s worship at its feet (yes, I know they have eyes but not
feet) and raise it to the status of a god like invention.
I won’t bother
going into the history of the chip, although there was a rather good BBC 4
documentary on fish and chips a few weeks back for those who are interested,
but my history of chip eating is the subject of this post….dissolves back to
the dim and distant past……well 1973 to be exact (what do you mean you weren’t
born!!)…….
Back in the day, I
enjoyed nothing more than going to watch our local team play. Their ground, the
great and sadly missed Green Pond Road was some 10 minutes walk away from our home….10
minutes which gave me plenty of time for a post match bag of chips. My
expenditure for the evening would go like this…admission 12 ½ p, 2 ½ p for a
programme, 5p for a can of coke at half time and 5p for a bag of chips on the
way home. So, an evening entertainment for 25p…. try telling the kids now days
that you could have an evening out for five bob and they would look at you all
strange and ask who was Bob and why did you need five of them?
Moving forward a
few years, well about 10, the next incident which comes to mind was a football
trip to Yeovil. My bother Gary and I arrived at the ground on the team coach
about two hours before kick-off so headed out for something to eat…..and of
course found a chip shop in which my now late brother (he died at aged 49 after
he fell off a ladder…. Yes, his weight meant that he was unable to fight the
infections he caught in hospital….) gave a master class in chip eating
finishing off not one, but two large bags of the steaming greasy love
torpedoes…. Er, perhaps I should have worded that differently? And to top it
all off, after the match he had another two bags while we waited for the coach
home… Gary, a man for all chips.
We move forward
Dear Reader to 1994. I have moved to the West Midlands and find myself working
with the shittiest people I have ever worked with…. Thinking about it, I would
have preferred to stay working as a temp putting rubbish in a waste compactor
than working with these low life back stabbing scum. And of course, that’s
their good points. I really hated working in the office, so would take myself
off out at lunchtime and to go and sit in my car. Yes, I know it’s antisocial
but that’s how I am at times. Anyway, whilst trying to get away from my work
colleagues I made a discovery the love of which has stayed with me
since….battered chips.
Like we don’t have
“wallys” in the Midlands, I am almost completely sure you don’t get battered
chips in the South East….its such a shame and I feel for you, I really do
(actually, on my last trip home I noted the loss of many fine local chip shops
with many of them being turned into “fast food” outlets….yuk yuk and double
yuk. Perhaps I should start the “Campaign for Real Chip Shops”). How to
describe their taste is beyond my literary skills (which as you will have noted
are quite limited anyway) but let’s say I would walk a mile of two to a shop
which sold them, rather than have normal chips. That’s not to say that normal
chips aren’t worth eating but why have ordinary when you have extraordinary. To
this end, I was so pleased when King Cod opened only half a mile from here…..
they know me and my order by heart. I feel sorry for them now that I am no
longer able to buy from them; their trade is going to suffer badly.
To bring us up to
date, given my increasing weight, CBH has moved me away from fried chips, to
something she calls “oven chips.” No, not the nasty frozen over priced rubbish
you can get from Tescos etc, but to homemade ones tossed in a little oil and
some pepper and roasted in the oven. While they don’t have the fattiness of a
fried chip, they aren’t bad.
Overall therefore,
chips have made me the man I am today. By chips, I am going to miss you…sob.
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