CHIPS



LUV - I have been alive on this planet for over three decades. I’ve resided in three continents. I’ve met kings and paupers and people from Bracknell and Jeff Brazier. Once I even almost got a TATTOO. In WALES. So I think we’re all agreed that I’m basically a suave cosmopolitan motherfucker.


And yet, through all this rich tapestry of florid human experience, I have never encountered anything lovelier than a chip.


By ‘chip’, incidentally, I mean hot rectangles of deep-fried potato, and not CRISPS which, although excellent, come further down the list of lovely things. In fact the list of lovely things goes like this:


1. CHIPS
2. NEW BEDLINEN WITH A HIGH THREAD COUNT 
3. ORGASMS, probably
4. RANDOMLY TURNING ON THE TELEVISION AND SEEING A FRIENDS EPISODE YOU’VE NEVER SEEN BEFORE 
5. KITTENS
6. CRISPS
7. SNOW DAYS WHEN YOUR KITCHEN IS FULLY STOCKED 
8. RANDOM ACTS OF KINDNESS
9. CHOCOLATE
10. LOVE OR WHATEVER


Chips are amazing. There is no comparable joy to eating chip shop chips outside in the frosty air when you’re hungry. The weight of the wrapped chips in your hand, heavy and warm like a delicious baby. The steamy, tangy vinegar smell that SPANGGS your saliva glands into overdrive. Unwrapping the paper and plopping a too-hot chip onto your tongue. Fanning your face as the sizzling potato sears the very meat from the roof of your mouth. Grinning like an idiot as you plonk fat squashy chips into your body, like salty edible friends who hug you from the inside.


And there are so many TYPES of chips:


OVEN CHIPS
Frozen chips you just throw into a baking tray and stick in the oven! And the challenge is finding the uncooked chip on your plate. There’s always one. It is the law.


CURLY FRIES
Mandelbrot spirals of Möbius potato perfection that, at 18, I genuinely thought came from one giant potato. At EIGHTEEN.


McDONALDS CHIPS
Chip perfection. Tossed in a secret blend of chicken salt, ambrosia and devil spunk before frying.


FRITES
Like British chips, but Belgian. So, thinner and slightly more snide.


MICROWAVE CHIPS
Like oven chips, but with extra carcinogens that allow you to go from zero to chip in 30 seconds!


Chips are wonderful. Chips are hot salty slivers of pure sunshine. At least I think they are. I’ve been on a diet for six weeks and haven’t seen a chip for months. Am I confusing them with bananas?
- Robyn Wilder


HAT - I’m not anticipating a very positive reaction here. Because they’re chips, right? Everyone likes chips. Who wouldn’t like chips? A paedophile?


I’m expecting this reaction because I get it a lot. Admitting that you don’t like chips is the same as admitting that you don’t like puppies, or admitting that it was you who decided to start calling Dime bars Daim bars and also you’re Kim Jong Il returned from the dead disguised as Jimmy Savile and you have a giant tattoo of Justin Bieber doing the Gangnam Style dance stretching all the way across the entirety of your back. It doesn’t go down well is basically what I’m saying.


Whenever I’ve told anyone that I don’t like chips, there’s been a uniform three-stage response. First, because I have a bit of a tummy and a near-permanent smear of ketchup across my face, people initially think I’m joking. Then, when they realise I’m not, they get suspicious. “Why don’t you like chips?” they ask. “Are you some sort of murderer? Or Chinese? Is that it? You’re a Chinese murderer?”


This suspicion eventually gives way to outright fury. Somehow, because I don’t like chips, I’ve managed to mortally offend them. I may as well have flung their baby off a motorway bridge. I may as well have shat out a swastika onto Barbara Windsor’s forehead. But it’s no good. They can shout all they like, but I can’t help not liking chips. Because chips, admit it, are a tiny bit shit.


They’re just so nothingy. When you’re presented with a plate of chips, you’re essentially being challenged to take the exact same mouthful of bland, quickly-cooling starchy nothing 30 times in a row. You may as well be eating polystyrene. You don’t get this with other food, you know. With a pizza, every mouthful’s an adventure. When you bite into a scotch egg, you’re guaranteed egg yolk, egg white, breadcrumbs and probably about 17 different bits of mashed-up animal organ. But when you eat a chip, that’s all you get. A chip.


And it doesn’t matter what sort of chip you get. Buying a portion of chipshop chips means joylessly trudging through fistful after fistful of soggy potato until you’re lying face-down in a coma brought about by equal parts guilt and boredom. Buying chips from McDonald’s means committing yourself to stuffing your face with a neverending procession of flaccid, pencil-thin slivers of freezing salt. Even if you go upscale and order Heston Blumenthal’s triple-cooked chips, you’re still getting a plate of flavourless nothing, albeit flavourless nothing that appears to be made of glass.


So fuck you, chips. Daddy or chips? Daddy, every time. Even if my daddy was Jack the Ripper. Even if my dad was Justin Lee Collins. Even if my daddy was you, you big-nosed arsehole. That’s how much I hate chips.
- Stuart Heritage