Poetry takes up residence all over

SHALL I compare thee to a battered cod? Or a locust? Or even the M&S new range of velour trousers? Bards are back with a vengeance. From chip shops to zoos to jails, there seems nowhere you can escape from declaiming versifiers.

Peter Street goes into fish and chip shops around Wigan. He said that chippies had always had a special place in his heart: "I had a spinal injury and lying there in the ward we all used to dream of fish and chips so that gave it a significance for me." he said. "The other reason was that the way I found out about the Munich aircrash was reading the newspaper in the chippie."

To critics who might sniff, he said there were valid reasons for the juxtaposition of sonnets and sausages: "All life is there in the chippy. There is a sense of closeness, of community about chip shop."

He has penned many an ode to the delights of cod and chips including one about Eve's big mistake: "She should have offered him chips/but the chippy was shut/half-day or something like" is Mr Street's explanation for the Fall of Man.