Chips Shop Survey. This is an odd activity to run I think, but good fun. Fish and chips are a traditional English take-away meal, in fact probably the only one that is a traditional English meal - the rest are Indian, Chinese, American, Italian... So considering its importance in our culture, don’t you think we should know which is the best chips in the area? We drew up a list of all the chip shops within a few miles of the village, and in the list we included other take-aways that sold chips. Now all throw in a pound or two (or take it from the funds), find a driver and drive round all the chip shops, buy one bag and test them. Hmmmm. It must have looked odd to see 7 young explorers clustered round a car or 2, sharing one bag of chips and arguing about their quality. To make things fair we had a marking scheme for them as well - an even odder sight, seeing the explorers then marking the chips. Our criteria ranged from the taste, temperature, colour, speed of service to other odder criteria such as the range of products sold, and for some reason, whether the serving staff had good side burns (apparently important) I'm not going to say what the results were, but needless to say that the proper chips shops do the best chips! Pizza shops do good pizzas, but cant do chips. If you want to try this yourselves, make sure that there is time to get round all the chip shops in the area, spend time getting the criteria right, and have fun. SP