Taking an unwelcome break
Motorway services have a captive audience – one that drove into their clutches voluntarily
Since I live in Cardiff and Imperial is in London, I am well-versed in the pages of English countryside that is the M4 corridor. Queues around Newport, chevrons outside of Bristol, roadworks just past Reading, I’m better than any SatNav. As well as speed cameras, lane narrowing and caravans, there is a section of motorway life that I have grown to know and loathe.
Motorway services. They can be found on every major highway, with more than a hundred of them up and down the country. Everyone has to use them; from the slick, young drivers of Aston Martins and Lamborghinis to the doddery old dears in their caravans and Winnebagos. Few other public amenities can boast of such widespread usage.
If only the ‘services’ part could be boasted of as well. A stay-over can range in terms of pleasantness from a stroll in the park on an overcast day to waiting in a bank queue in purgatory. Every services will have a fast-food outlet and a quasi-restaurant-café affair and the only difference between them is that the burger bar is a bit more honest about the ‘quality’ of the food. And the trays are different colours.
A pack of chewing gum once cost me 75p. 75p?! You could buy a small country for that price (admittedly, a very small country)
In addition to this, their prices – as well as those of the customary shop (invariably a WH Smith) – are extortionate. A pack of chewing gum once cost me 75p. 75p?! You could buy a small country for that price (admittedly, a very small country). In fact, it was more expensive than the overpoweringly odorous meal that I had before it. But they are the only services for at least twenty miles and the really clever part is that they have a captive audience that drove into their clutches voluntarily.
Services are always busy and nowhere is this truer than the toilets. There have been times when I’ve visited the gents that there has been standing room only – even in the cubicles. This isn’t surprising since they are the main reason why most people stop at the places to begin with. Given their rate of thoroughfare, they present another opportunity for commercial ventures. Notice, for a start, how they are always located at the back of the services so to reach them you have to pass through the inveiglements of all the shops and food outlets. In truly hectic times, the queues will snake back past the arcades – very shrewd architectural planning and a temptation not easily resisted. But the selling goes on even inside the toilets. Condoms are standard fare but more eclectic choices include chewable toothbrushes, balls of wet wipes and, my personal favourite, “horny goat weed complex”. And that doesn’t even cover the services advertised in the cubicles.
Some services have a bridge that spans across the motorway. I know of no-one who has gone over one and returned to tell the tale. Still, that doesn’t stop absent-minded wonderings over a Costa coffee and a Little Chef burger. Maybe the bridge leads to a nightmarish other-world filled with esoteric horrors and once familiar things now eldritch. Or maybe it leads to the services on the other side of the motorway, I don’t know.
Up until now, I’ve been rather critical of motorway services but they are not all bad. No matter what misadventures you may experience within, they do offer rest from the monotony of motorway driving. Without them, we would be driven to either tedium or insanity, neither of which is a preferable destination. To take half an hour out to relax and do nothing can only be good for us.
It is only a shame that we don’t apply this logic of the highways to the rest of our lives. As we struggle ever closer to the twenty-five hour day, cramming more and more stuff in an already packed schedule, we miss out on the vital benefits of doing sod all. I blame the motorway services. Only they could make the art of nothing a chore.
