YOU get just 15 minutes on a Monday evening to buy freshly cooked fish and chips from a mobile chippie in the little Lincolnshire village of Donington on Bain so I’m parked up early by the local school.
The van comes round the corner bang on schedule and before it’s even wheeled to a stop a door slides open and the smell of frying fills the air.
For the Jolly Rogers mobile chippy (apostrophe not included) Donington is the fifth and last village of the night on its weekdays schedule. There are a dozen or so of us waiting, politely forming a queue in the order we have arrived.
Fifteen minutes is generous. One stop in one night rates only five minutes according to the timetable.
Mobile fish frying is a two person job. There’s the driver-cum-frier who is at the sizzling little range as soon as he has put the handbrake on .And the lady who scribbles down your order, boxes it up and takes the money, cards accepted, does it all at lightning speed.
Jolly Rogers is a family business and there has been a van scuttling along Lincolnshire’s back roads for the last half century.
Not the same van, of course. I’m only a once a year when on holiday customer and last year it was red.
The fish is haddock. We are north of that invisible dividing line that runs between Sheffield and Barnsley when the People’s Fish changes from cod to haddock.
A very nice fillet it is, too, cooked expertly with a crisp, crunchy batter cooked all the way through, decent chips and fluorescent green mushy peas.
There’s always a little bit of magic going out to the chippie and somehow it’s even better queuing up in the middle of a village on a blustery April evening.
Another helping from Martin Dawes 