Cheesed of with posh crisps

Or, if I’m going with the current trend, the title of this column should in fact be “Mature Scottish cheddar cheesed off, with West Country chives and a hint of sea salt”.

You might have to strain your brain to remember this, but there was a time when the choice of the potato crisp fancier was beautifully simple.

In the pub on a Saturday night (before the days when we all started staring at our phones rather than having a conversation) you could choose from Salt and Vinegar, Cheese and Onion or Ready Salted. Maybe Prawn Cocktail, if you were in a particularly progressive establishment, with liberal views on thinly-sliced fried potato snack flavourings.

Back then, the introduction of crisps with ridges seemed pretty radical, especially when you consider that we’d only just got used to the idea of not needing to hunt for a little blue packet of salt so we could season the crisps ourselves (I once got two of them in a packet, and was the most popular kid in school for a week). The arrival of Ready Salted felt enormously decadent.

You knew what you were getting too, as the packets generally had a clear window, allowing potential purchasers to eye-up the mouth-watering contents in advance. Now, our snacks are too embarrassed to show themselves, hiding their pretentiousness in foily packaging, “for freshness”.

Slowly but surely, the humble crisp started getting all sophisticated. It began with the idea that we would assume adding the word “Sea” in front of “Salt” increased the yumminess of the slices of spud within. Soon, the onion had been booted out in favour of the chive, the cheese came in a variety of regional variations, and even the vinegar had taken part in an ill advised fling with some cider.

The insidious rise of the posh munchies (They all now seem to be “hand cooked”, which frankly sounds quite dangerous) appears to have reached epidemic level.

Just last week, I was confronted with “Scottish Langoustines with dill & lemon hand cooked crisps”, plus the geographic heritage of the main ingredients. I’m not even sure what at least one of those things is. I’m guessing the next step will be to inform me of the name of the person who hand-cooked them’s cat, and what music I should be listening to when I eat them.

Enough of these hipster munchies! Bring back the simple joy of a maximum of 2 flavours in my snack pack! Otherwise, soon they will have to sell them with an accompanying pamphlet, and we’ll all starve to death whilst trying to figure out what they’ll taste of.

Right – I’m off for a packet of artisan hand cooked Jersey potato slices, fried with pure Yak fat from the North East Sahara, with a hint of cracked black pepper, Kalamata Olives, Chilean Chorizo, and Fennel from Farmer Giles’ organic boutique herb emporium, 27 High Street, Pinge, with a dash of English oak-smoked Mediterranean garlic and hand-reared South Oxfordshire parsnip jus...

This post first appeared as my "Thank grumpy it's Friday" column, in the North West Evening Mail, on the 5th of June 2015. I know that, because I've seen it. It hasn't appeared on their website yet, which is a shame as I thought this was one of my better efforts, but if you want to see if it pops up and leave a suitably witty and erudite comment, take a look here.

Otherwise, please feel free to leave comments here. It doesn't happen very often, so when it does I feel special. Which is nice. Everyone needs to feel special from time to time. I tried to feel special in the supermarket once, but I'm banned from Tesco now.

Things have got silly in Snacksville, haven't they? Having said that, they're getting pretty silly everywhere else as well. We seem to have started thinking food is only edible if it's either massively retro, 'ironic', or poncily presented (bread served in a flat cap, desserts in a Kilner jar, 'old-fashioned' lemonade) or featuring allegedly the finest ingredients on the planet, which is just an excuse to charge a load more anyway.

Damn - there goes my blood pressure again...

(CD singles time - Queen's "Heaven For Everyone" is currently getting a high-speed, laser-read, spin.)

Making an exhibition of yourself

Now and again, it’s good to reaffirm that you’re a (relatively) normal human being. One excellent way of doing this is to go to a business exhibition. Despite what you might have surmised from reading my previous columns, I am employable, and even capable of acting like a regular person most of the time, even joining in the Monday morning conversation about the weather over the weekend, and why (insert name of footyballs manager here) should be fired immediately. The mug! True, there are times, often involving a caffeine deficiency, where it is like having the distilled essence of ten moody teenagers in the room, but I try and get that out of the way when people I genuinely like aren’t around to see it. As part of my ongoing experiment with what others call ‘working’, my ‘job’ involves me occasionally needing to go and see what some of my colleagues get up to outside the office, and what our competitors do to try and make sure that they do whatever my colleagues do better than ...

Unstable Stables: Throw away the key

It’s comforting to know that there is one less threat to the people of Cumbria this week, following the conviction of white supremacist, Ethan Stables. The 20 year old from Barrow had planned to attack the town’s New Empire pub in June 2017, in the midst of a gay pride event. Despite social media posts saying he was “going to war” and planning to “slaughter”, online searches about how to make bombs and chemical poisons, and expressing hatred of Muslims, Jews and gay people, he claimed his online comments were merely to impress far-right friends. Fortunately, following Facebook posts about his intentions, the police were tipped off and armed officers intercepted him as he headed towards the pub. His aim was to kill anyone he found, with a machete. In a bizarre slip-up, Stables had erroneously added an innocent woman to his neo-Nazi Facebook group. When he vented his outrage at the Furness LGBT support group’s event, the shocked woman contacted the authorities. He’ll have ple...

Is it foggy? No.

When I get put in charge (which is bound to happen soon), I'm going to introduce a whole raft of new laws, for I shall be a just and fair ruler. I'm quite liking the title of 'Most Marvellous Emperor Of Sensible Regulations And Bountiful Lovingness Not To Mention Exceedingly Handsome', but it might be a bit long. On that basis, I'll settle for the more informal 'He Who Is Smashing' from my loyal subjects. Anyway, I digress. I do that sometimes - had you noticed? Here, then, is the first law that will introduced: grumpyf1 law No.1 - Turn your fog lights off, you complete git. Don't get me wrong; If it genuinely is foggy, fog lights are quite handy. The reason for introduction of this law is because 96% of the time (based on my own in-depth research) it isn't foggy when some utter cockwomble blinds you. This has always been a bit of a problem but in the last couple of years it seems to have escalated out of control, possibly because of the...

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