Mark Lambe

[Mark Lambe @marklambe007]

@AutoInfatuation 19”s all day Sam

[Mark Lambe @marklambe007]

@ListerLawrence Right all day

[Sama Hoole @SamaHoole]

Chips fried in beef dripping were a different object to what passes for a chip today.

Walk into a Whitby chippy in 1978. The fryer has been on since 11am. The fat in it is beef dripping, held at 180 degrees by a man in a white apron who has been frying chips since he was fifteen. There are no seed oils in the building. The idea would not occur to anyone.

Thick-cut Maris Pipers, ninety seconds in the dripping. Dark gold at the edges, fluffy inside, crisp in a way that sets your teeth against them. Salt. Vinegar. Paper. Two bob.

You eat them walking home along the harbour wall. The chip tastes of the chip and also of something underneath the chip, something deeper, something you don't have a name for because you are nine and nobody names it, it is just what chips taste like.

That taste was beef dripping.

By 2002, 90% of British chippies had switched to rapeseed, palm, or sunflower oil, on the advice of public health officials citing research since quietly retracted. A stable saturated fat used for ten thousand years, swapped for an industrial oil invented in 1911, oxidised at fryer temperatures for twelve hours a day.

A seed-oil chip is lighter, flatter. The crust doesn't hold. The flavour stops at the potato. No deeper note. No roast beef on a Friday.

Ask a British person under thirty what chips are supposed to taste like and they will describe, with complete sincerity, the chip they have always eaten. A chip their great-grandfather would have considered a practical joke. They cannot miss it, because the reference point was removed from the national palate before they were born.

A handful of chippies still fry in dripping. The Magpie in Whitby. A few survivors in Yorkshire, Lancashire, the Black Country.

Go. Drive. Queue. Eat them standing up, out of the paper.

You will understand, in one bite, what was taken.

The cow is still in the field. The suet is still at the butcher. The fryer could be switched back tomorrow.

A whole country forgot what a chip was.

[Mark Lambe @marklambe007]

@AutoInfatuation AUS 1 👌🏼

[Mark Lambe @marklambe007]

@TomBlackmore90 Fantastic car

[Mark Lambe @marklambe007]

@susanadams19990 @mrspoindexter24 Where are you based

[Mark Lambe @marklambe007]

@OliLondonTV Yes absolutely

[Mark Lambe @marklambe007]

I just signed the petition calling on the UK Government to pay victims of the Horizon scandal the compensation they deserve. Will you sign too? https://t.co/w15EypPFGP via @38degrees

[Mark Lambe @marklambe007]

Michelle Mone has admitted that she lied to the media over her links to a PPE firm. Enough is enough, it's time those in power put an end to this sordid affair. Sign the petition now and demand Mone is expelled from the House of Lords: https://t.co/XpV9wtT5at

[Mark Lambe @marklambe007]

Compensate Wrongly Accused Sub-Postmasters by the Post Office Fairly and with Interest - Sign the Petition! https://t.co/nh4PjGhRtk via @UKChange

[Mark Lambe @marklambe007]

I just signed the petition calling on Paula Vennells, the former CEO of the Post Office to be stripped of her CBE. Will you sign too? #MrBatesVSThePostOffice https://t.co/xkt2x4Eg5s via @38degrees

[Mark Lambe @marklambe007]

I've #justsponsored Mary Campbell, who's fundraising for PROSTATE CANCER UK on @JustGiving. Donate now https://t.co/ZxQu9mKGTl

[Mark Lambe @marklambe007]

I'm raising money for a cause close to my heart and would love your support. https://t.co/Kv2p1NoI3R

[Mark Lambe @marklambe007]

@whatcar Absolutely. The future not electric

[Mark Lambe @marklambe007]

@piersmorgan You gotta be kiddin’

[Marina Purkiss @MarinaPurkiss]

Course he is…

So there we have it

Our disgraced, law-breaking, under investigation, country-wrecking, ex-PM will be able to stuff the Lords with 50 of his back-scratching cronies and sycophants

…like Baroness Nadine Dorries.

https://t.co/O3wpIRzAU8

[Mark Lambe @marklambe007]

@ianhislop is there anyone more smug, annoying and ugly the Ian Hislop?

[Mark Lambe @marklambe007]

@LisaMMcGee Lee Mack conspicuously not clapping your acceptance speech but at least caught on national TV!

[Mark Lambe @marklambe007]

@30plusGoneWild 10