canny granny

Whatever happened to fish and chips

Remember Fish and Chips on Fridays? That’s how we knew what day of the week it was, by the greasy bits of flake wrapped up in old newspaper. (We never minded the print dye running into the batter, it gave the potato cake an extra zing.)

You just can’t get fatty food like that anymore, all these young people want nothing but low fat, no salt, no sugar, biodynamic batter and organic cold pressed oil for totally taste-free flake.

Constance Brown, 98, has been frying fish and chips for 80 years in her little corner fish and chip shop. She’s been eating them too. “That’s all I eat. I don’t eat any vegetables at all.”, she says. “So I’m living proof you can eat nothing but fish and chips and still be healthy.”

You can’t tell me that Connie has been tucking away this new-fangled low fat fish since the war.

What’s in your drawers?

Meet Winifred Whelan, who was threatened in her home by a man brandishing a 10-inch knife. She grabbed a larger carving knife from her kitchen, shoved it at the heroic intruder’s belly and quoted the famous words from Crocodile Dundee “That’s not a knife, this is a knife!”

This is the sort of thing that makes me look in my kitchen drawers. Somewhere under the balls of string, paper bags, loose chopsticks, old dry- cleaning dockets and takeaway menus, there may be a knife. I’m sure that bus tickets breed in my kitchen drawers, there’s no other explanation for their presence in such great numbers. And who put a packet of mothballs in there?