Hell is a motorway service station |
If OPM had released an antithetical response to their 2000 magnum opus ‘Heaven Is a Halfpipe’, I’m certain it would have been called ‘Hell Is a British Service Station’. Had this song been made, I think it would have gone a little something like this: ‘If I die before I wake / I’ll spend eternity in a Welcome Break / ’Cause right now on earth, I can’t do jack / I’m at a service station and my tyre’s flat / Now hell would be a Roadchef / With a Costa bacon bap / And hell would be the toilets / After a curry at Watford Gap.’ Admittedly, the lyrics could do with some workshopping, but you get the point.
Britain’s service stations are some of the worst liminal spaces known to man, beaten only by the queue at the post office, a solo breakfast in the ‘dining room’ of a Premier Inn, and Westfield Stratford (or just Stratford in general). Service stations do something to our psyche. A person can’t claim to have experienced the silence of the cosmos until they’ve stood on the bridge at Charnock Richard services and looked down at the oncoming traffic as their Burger King Chicken Royale hardens in their hand. It takes watching a bloke in his thirties smoke a rollie and ride the kiddie coin machine outside the service station toilets to truly understand what Voltaire meant when he said ‘I am abandoned by God and man!’. Service stations warp time. If you’ve seen Interstellar, it’s basically like that: one hour inside a service station is the equivalent of seven years in the outside world.
But service stations weren’t always this bleak. In fact, there was a time when the service station was a destination unto itself. Britain’s first motorway opened in 1958 – for........