Chips with everything (or not as the case may be!)

(Apologies for the title to those of you who remember that column from Scouting mag)

Last night we had a Chip-Shop survey in our programme for Explorers. Before-hand I dilligently typed out a mark sheet and printed several copies off to take with me (and I actually remembered to pick them up on my way out of the door!). However, I had assumed that the vast majority of chippys would be open on a tuesday evening - it turns out that they aren't. :-(
Of the three I had eye-balled previously, only one was open, so we sampled some chips from a chinese (bleurgh, bleurgh and thrice bleurgh - and they weren't too hot!) and from KFC (not as good as I expected and definitely lacking in the heat dept!) along with two chip-shops. One of these was one I had spotted and knew to be not very good, and the other was one that the explorers knew about themselves. Generally the people we're happy to donate a portion for us to sample, however at the chinese we sampled, we got 6 chips to share around 11 of us and the bloke behind the counter at KFC had to get the manager. Overall, the general consensus is that the chippys (and others) around the Hillsborough football ground are more interested in throughput and quantity of customers than the quality of their produce. It seems to be a rough rule of thumb (for those of a scientific persuasion) that the quality of chips is directly proportional to the distance from the visitors end of the ground!!