HOW dare anyone say that chip butties are on the decline? (LET, August 21).

Never in a million years -- and as long as there is a Lancashire.

Chip butties have never tasted better. The only trouble now is the bread -- nothing like the bread of the old days.

All you needed was one slice of home-baked bread, with chips on top, then another slice on top of that. You had to open your mouth very wide to bite into that.

Then, there was the bacon buttie, with the fat seeping through -- and jolly good, they tasted.

Then, of course, there was the cotton wool buttie -- which was made if a child had swallowed something such as a hair grip.

Cotton wool was put into a sandwich and had to be eaten with porridge. X-rays would show the cotton-wool had wrapped round the hair-grip and the porridge helped to work the bowels.

ADA GIBSON, Grane Street, Clayton-le-Moors.