The London Review of Crisps
Saturday, 5 January 2008
I spent Christmas between my new in-law’s house and my parent’s house. The festive season taught me two things.
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1. My flat in Shepherd’s Bush doesn’t have any bathroom scales, and so when I’m there I often completely loose track of how much I hate myself.
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2.Rest isn’t always good for the brain.
A honeymoon at an all-inclusive resort, followed by two christmases with two sets of people who are apparently competing to see if they can feed you more than the other, can mean you put on all the weight you lost before your wedding. And the free time that having grandparents dote on your child gives you doesn’t always come up with great ideas.
The London Review of Crisps. It seemed like a good idea at the time.
A while ago I had the idea of starting a website called The London Review of Crisps. This christmas I got drunk and vowed to myself, and my friend Sheridan, that I would make it. I’d discussed the idea, usually drunk with Sheridan, Chris, my writing partner and Mick Ferry, one of my favorite comics from Oldham, but never had the time to do anything about it. Which of course, was a good thing, because it’s a stupid idea; starting a website that sets out to review all of the crisps on the UK market.
This christmas I sat down and made the website. The idea was to savagely satirize the whole industry of critical review by applying it to something completely inoffensive and disposable, like snack food. Each review (I was going to specialize in potato crisps, and Sheridan had reluctantly volunteered to be the Maize Correspondent - because he likes Monster Munch) would lambast a certain sort of critic, but most of them would lambast Mark Lawson. Natalie was going to review diet crisps, and the joke was that she would review ten times more packets than everyone else, getting through twenty-odd pack of low-fat crisp a day.
On my second day of assembling “The London Review” it occurred to me that I still hadn’t updated either of my two websites for nearly two years, and that perhaps starting a new one that would require sitting down and writing an article every time I ate a bag of crisps, was possibly a great big fucking waste of time.
I’m writing this instead. But I think I may have just convinced myself that it’s a great idea and I should launch it as soon as possible.
Walkers Cream Cheese & Cracked Black Pepper Corn Chips with poppy seeds: The penultimate, and first crisp to be reviewed by the London Review of Crisps
