ONE thing that astonishes foreigners when they go around Britain is the number of differences they see when going from region to region.

Accents, dress, attitude and more are all different in different town, cities, counties and countries in the UK.

Whether it’s the flat caps of Yorkshire, pearly kings and queens of London or kilts of Scotland, we display our differences with pride.

Accents, raging from the broad Glaswegian, full on Geordie to the the lilting Welsh, also help mark us out as being from somewhere.

But so does your local chippy.

From the salt and sauce and lack of beans or gravy in Scotland to the moist mess eaten by Yorkshire diners and onto the strange chips, cheese and beans scoffed by those in Cardiff, our chip shops show our regional differences.

Wherever you travel you’ll be faced with the odd strange choice or two when you reach the counter - not least what a breadcake is called.

In Barnsley it’s a breadcake, my Huddersfield-born colleagues tell me I’m wrong and it’s teacake while up and down the country it’s called everything from a cob to a roll to a barm.

One constant that the nation had in common in the chippy was that of cod and chips - regardless of what it was (or wasn’t) smothered with.

But even that appears to be changing.

Whereas once you could devour your own weight in cod or haddock, now as our fish stocks dwindle you could be getting a different species on your plate.

The alternative fish beneath the batter isn’t just to do with overfishing though - apparently the seas around the UK are warming at a swift rate meaning the make-up of our oceans in changing.

It may be that in a few years we have to wave goodbye to our traditional chums and when you go into a chippy in 2020, it may be for a portion of mullet and chips.

How about a sea bass butty? Not to your tastebuds? Why not try a gurnard fishcake?

Still not licking your lips, then I offer you red mullet. With bits and beans of course.

The transition from fine dining to plastic tray and wooden fork has happened over the last 30 something years with temperatures in our seas rising by 1.6c.

It not seem, or indeed feel, much to you but our chums the fish this increase is a big thing.

According to a series of scientists, fish that like the cold water have packed their bags and shifted north while southern visitors have been caught creeping further and further up our coasts.

This means that if you’re a fisherman down south - or indeed off Yorkshire - you’ll be catching more John Dory, ling and sardines than you can shake a stick at - but unfortunately not many people in the UK are particularly interested in the contents of your net, with the vast majority heading off overseas to our European chums.

So it seems that we as consumers have a decision to make. Do we abandon our traditional white flakey morsels of fish for something a bit different or do we cling onto what we know and bear the brunt of rising prices as cod, haddock et al get that much harder to find?

It’s a tough one - I’m just glad that there are still shoals of glistening battered sausages plunging through the white crests of the waves around the Uk, ready to be hooked and pulled into a fisherman’s net.

That’s what the man in my local chippy tells me anyway.