SNAKES alive, you’d better thank your lucky stars that you’re not from Nottingham.

Yes they’ve got lots of pubs, are rumoured to have a surfeit of women compared to men and believe they’re the home to all things Robin Hood.

Normally all decent checks in the plus column for a place.

But there’s one big fat x in the against column.

Apparently the good burghers of Nottingham enjoy pea wet on their chips.

Pea what? No, pea wet.

This delicacy seems to consist of the water from tins of peas. And that’s it.

So it’s water and pea debris. Oh. and a battered sausage please.

Apparently you can’t swing a cob (breadcake if you’re from Barnsley) without it landing in this Midlands elixir.

If you think that sounds bad, then avoid Blackpool.

Our illumination hungry co-Northerners can’t get enough of salad cream on their chips.

Salad cream.

What a sad comedown for the home of the kiss-me-quick hat.

All these (somewhat) spurious chip related facts have been collated by a website for a firm that organises fast food deliveries to your front door.

Maybe they only have three customers with no sense of taste in Blackpool who have skewed the survey.

I’m sure we have all heard of Leeds.

Some of us may have even taken that long train, car or bus journey and visited this far-flung metropolis.

Now try and guess what the favourite topping is for chips in this foreign outpost.

Never mind three guesses, I’ll give you 300 and you still wouldn’t get it.

Having lived in Leeds and (laying my cards on the table) having friends from Leeds I can genuinely tell you that I’d never had this allegedly commonplace topping.

I certainly don’t remember rivers of it running down the gutters into the drains as, if you believe everything you read, it almost certainly should have been.

The top chip topping in Leeds is...Chinese barbecue sauce.

I kid you not.

Despite all the absolute cobblers I did notice a trend in the survey – the good old North South divide.

Aberdeen does it with doner meat, Manchester enjoys meaty gravy over their fat and chunky chips while Liverpool loves their crispy ones served in a well-buttered bap.

During this year’s National Chip Week I think the north should speak out loud and proud about our fantastic chippy heritage.

To hell with curly fries and all manner of dips. Moistness should come in the holy quartet of peas, gravy, beans or curry. Chips should be fat, not anorexic slips.

Fish batter should be thick and crispy, not limp and as thin as a bingo ticket.

And sausages should be large and battered. And there should be a plentiful supply of bits to fall over your meal like snow that induces a heart attack.

In sharp relief, if you’re lucky to find yourself in Bournemouth you can enjoy the delights of string fries with garlic mayonnaise.

Have a word Bournemouth.

And if London’s fave – salt only on thin chips – isn’t as dour an assessment of the depressing state of the mentality of the hard-pressed Tube commuter then I don’t know what it.

If anything we should be holding out an olive branch to our southern cousins. The only trouble is they’d take it, harvest the olives and add them to a ciabatta roll and claim it as the world’s greatest for holding chips on.