We finally got round to going out for a family dinner to celebrate my birthday tonight, if we’d left it any longer it would have been a joint celebration with my dad’s or maybe we could have really dragged it out and combined everything together for our Christmas meal. The venue was The Willow Tree, we’ve had quite a good run here as usually something happens to put us off causing us to have to find somewhere else, this being I think the fourth place we have called headquarters. Standards have never dropped here with the steak done to perfection (although it isn’t difficult to do a rare steak) and the service spot on.

On our walk home from the pub I always turn to Mandi and for a joke I ask if she fancies popping in the chip shop for a bag of chips, I am hilarious and repeating jokes just makes them funnier, try it.

Fish and chips is a difficult thing to get right, you are of course better off buying them at the seaside for reasons of freshness, but you need some kind of insider knowledge because seaside towns have a lot of shops that intentionally sell any old shit because holidaymakers aren’t fussy. In Skegness for example you should only use Eptons or Salts, never any of the shops on the promenade. Whitby has Mr. Chips and one other I can’t remember the name of, (NOT the Magpie which is overrated) although ‘Whitby’ fish isn’t caught in Whitby at all. I recently learned that if a chip shop is open on a Monday you should not use it as the fish won’t be fresh because the fishermen don’t go out on Sunday. In an inland city, you have to be very careful; Nottingham for example only has two proper fish and chip shops, until now.

This photograph displays one of the most disappointing declarations since Samantha Fox came out as a lesbian.

M&S Fish Bar was the best inland fish and chip shop in Nottingham, a traditional fish and chip shop that sold items that should be seen in such a place. If we go for a chippy tea then I have haddock, chips, mushy peas, pickled egg, and scraps. This place until recently was one of the only traditional chip shops, you knew it was a traditional chip shop because it didn’t use the word ‘traditional’ in its name. Shops calling themselves a traditional fish and chip shop generally sell kebabs, pizza, fried chicken, and various other things that simply do not belong in a fish and chip shop. A lower quality chippy has opened over the road selling such none-chip shop items and it looks as though M&S have seen the new shop as some kind of competition which is terrible news. It would have been fine to have a ‘traditional’ (not traditional) chip shop selling kebabs and other such crap to idiots and M&S could have carried on catering for people who know what quality is. M&S have obviously seen this new shop as a threat (although in reality only a threat in the same way that Fortnum & Mason’s should feel threatened by a Greggs opening next door) and have dumbed down in order to attract the custom of the sort of people who you don’t want custom from. This is sadly a sign of the world we live in now, where the stupid people get everything their way.

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