Chips with everything

Now I know that the title is a cliché but I considered it apposite. It is in fact the title of a play by Arnold Wesker, not, as my copy of Enclopaedia Brittanica would have it, a part of the Wesker Trilogy, but a powerful freestanding play about some new recruits into the army. It is a play that I read when at school and it captured my imagination at the time. I was reminded of it last week as we journeyed through Normandy and Belgium, visiting the scenes of many of the battles of the two world wars. The scale of the carnage that took place in those two terrible periods of history is mind boggling. The graveyards and monuments are everywhere and still corpses are discovered in the fields nearly 100 years on. To say that I felt humbled and saddened is an understatement, and yet I was also impressed that these places are still being visited by swarms of people, all of whom show the greatest respect for these, mainly young, men who were butchered in their hundreds of thousands, and for what?

Most of us have relatives who fought in these conflicts. Some, the lucky few managed to return and those that did were forever changed by the experiences that they went through. My relatives managed to survive, but they never wanted to talk about what happened at Ypres or Passchendale. There are plenty of images and movie footage to explain why.

We stayed in a number of hotels, and ate in a number of restaurants, being fond of French and Belgian food. This time i noticed two differences in the cuisine compared with previous visits to this part of the world. One is that the whole experience has become more expensive and it seems that unless you are very lucky or wealthy, everything comes with chips! Mussels and chips, ok that is a fair combination but whatever happened to the traditional vegetables perfectly cooked and served? I guess that sadly the French are drifting into the 21st century.