THE NIGHT OF THE LIVING DEAD

Service stations. Service stations at three in the morning, when the only customers are rock bands, acid housers who’ve been looking for some bright lights in a field since July of 1987 and insomniac compulsive gamblers who can’t close their eyes without seeing the bells and cherries of Newport Pagnell’s fruit machines and just have to come back for that £14 jackpot. At three in the morning the Burger King is closed, the all day breakfast is finished and there’s no staff.

Just one woman sat behind the counter in the mags and fags shop and another making the coffees and hot chocolates in the Country Kitchen / Pantry / Barn / Cottage over the footbridge on the Northbound stretch of the motorway. We’d pull in there looking like zombies, caught in the no man’s land between drunk and hungover, in search of a tray of vastly over priced food and coffee and a WC that accepts solids. When the soup of the day is now the soup of the night, and the badly EQ’d service station soundtrack is the music of the eighties, always, even in the sixties and the seventies. Songs that you know but can’t remember who’s singing them, it might be Glen Medeiros, or is that a make of Scottish cooking sherry?

I think the staff that worked at these places in the middle of the night were as sleep deprived and bored as we were. We once visited a services restaurant for a very early breakfast, all eleven of us wearing moustaches. It wasn’t a Freddie Mercury night, it had been our bus driver Eric’s birthday. He’d taken us to Blackpool Pleasure Beach for a day out on The Big One (I didn’t go on it), The Grand National, The Revolution and The Log Flume, he was a lovely man and we liked him, he was in our top five of all time great bus drivers. Oh, and he had a moustache. But the point is that the staff who served us our runny eggs and stewed beans and took our money at the till didn’t bat an eyelid. It was as though a busload of men with ridiculous moustaches often popped in at four in the morning for breakfast.

We had our favourite services. Farthing Corner on the M2, purely because it sounded a bit like Farting Corner, anything with a Little Chef restaurant, and there used to be - may still be - a services in the Lake District that was the only one in England that was independently owned that we always used to visit when we were on our way to Scotland, because we felt we were doing our bit for anti globalization when we bought a cup of splosh and a jam doughnut.

And then there’d be the tough decisions: stop at the next services toilet 1 mile ahead, or cross your legs and hang on to the next in 26 miles. You want to get to your destination as soon as possible and no matter how quick you are it always takes at least an hour for a services stop, so is it better to hang on a bit longer while the traffic’s clear but running the risk of wetting yourself? Or stop now and psychologically make your journey 25 miles longer than it actually is? So you split the difference and pull off at the nearest one but only go to the garage to use the toilet and get yourself a cheese ploughman’s and a bag of Hot Mega Monster Munch, super heartburn flavour. (Do four mentions qualify me for some sort of sponsorship deal with Walkers Crisps?) And while you’re there you fill the hired diesel motor up with unleaded petrol, seizing the engine and upsetting the AA man who can’t believe anyone could be so stupid.

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