I was about to post my regular update upon the state of British Food, when I noted the contribution from an abroad chappie, questioning the even-handed content of our group postings. Clearly a bod whose access is lacking in regularity!
Thus to my main point:
Twas but yesterweek when, after consulting the lately published 'National Fish and Chips Guide.' (CAMFRCAF, Ballsover 2008), I ventured with no mean appetite, into 'Ye Olde English Chippy' upon Back Wigan Alley in the award-winning hamlet of Thwistlethwaite-in-the-Fylde, tucked away in the royal 'Forest the Tudors' which, for those unfamiliar with England, nestles unassumingly beneath the craggy peaks of the Upper-Black Pennines in the north-east corner of the most royal and ancient County of Lancastria. (As opposed to the north-west annex, much beloved by the ice-cream smeared, candy-floss sticky, garishly coloured, kiss-me-quick labelled, loudly coach partying Spice Girl look-a-likes.)
Betty, the comely wife with twinkle eye and naughty smile, copied down my order in her neat, copper-plate selwyn script, upon the margin of a most recently ironed copy of the Independant - with her immaculate HB pencil!
"Fish, chips & a double portion of mushy peas", was writ both neat and clear. Enough as to be understandable, even by the fifteenth and motor-cycling, gentleman in the queue; once, that is, he had raised the sundym visor of his rainbowed head-gear.
And so, dear friends, to the rub.
For when Betty, yes even she - a paradigm of vestibular contreptitude and actricious veximiraburation - the wizened proprieter of that singular emporium, contrived to begin the assemblage of my day-longed-for respast upon the Independantly supported gease-proof, she firstly laid down the sizzling, golden fish with aclarity and then made to lay upon it, the contents of her generously heaped chip shovel!
Even as I write this missive I am already aware of your horror as the full weight of what you have just read hits you full in your sensitivities!
Fear not, fellow English gourmez, for I was awake. I had not travelled this norhern pilgrimage to have the sepulchre of my expectation detatched from the very pinnacle of my utopia by such a simple, but ignoble catastrophe.
"Nay", I cried, "desist,good-wife! Think-ahead! What will needs do with the double portion of peas if the chips are laid second?"
Seeing then the inevitable outcome of her distracted methodology, and grasping at once the enormity of her mistake, her face turned as red as a Yorkshireman's thingy, and, with the fulsome honesty and deprecation of a true Lancshire friaress, she shuddered deeply, came to her senses and without spilling a single chip, did it the right way.
I know that you will concurr when I tell you that I thanked the Great Friar of the Universe that I was there that day. For, having received the fullsome gratitude of a mightily relieved Betty; not to mention the two gigantic pickled onions for which there had been no extra charge, I left the dripping laden atmosphere of that ubiquitous emporium with its reputation unblemished, to the thunderous applause of the whole queue.
And now, albeit in retrospect, I shudder to think of the extent of our Nation's embarrassment, had a foreign visitor been standing - in place of me - in that queue!