This is the group for British Food!

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! 

-- 
BW Chris F. 
[ British Iyonix, RISC OS 5.13 & A9 ]
This Englishmans computer is his Castle.

date: Fri, 25 Jan 2008 20:14:29 GMT author: Chris F