Service Stations During the Bank Holiday

Somewhere along the way the world made a deal with the devil, and the devil gave us the Service Station. Stopping at a service station during the summer holidays is like reenacting the end of Dr. Faustus, a piledriving assault on the senses that makes a Saturn V launch look like a party popper.

It begins with the car park. Although most service station car parks are vast, they have been designed to cope with three, four cars before reaching capacity. The problem lies in the instructions to get to the car park. Fresh from a 70 mph chortle down the M40, the driver encounters a series of rapid choices that must be made while decelerating. This is fine if you are hitting the pit lane for a quick tyre change during a Formula 1 race, but the average joe turned the old ticking brain off as soon as he left work and now he’s expected to use it on the way to his bloody summer holiday.

Dad's been driving for days - all he wants is overpriced coffee

It won’t happen. Suddenly minivans are pulling up at the HGV petrol pumps, looking like a group of Borrowers on a jolly, caravans are pulling into disabled bays, children are caught up amongst Tron-style motorcycle calamities and some bloke in a Reliant Robin reckons he can gobble his overpriced Wimpy while making his way to the coast, until the secret sauce stains his trousers and he ploughs headlong into a lorry at 10 mph. In my head this would trigger some kind of Die Hard 2-esque explosion, but it would most likely result in a minor insurance claim.

Don't reverse! Don't reverse! Doh!

For those fortunate enough to find a space, the service station will then perform a clever perceptual trick. If caught in a summer shower, it will recede from view until it is quite clearly several miles away. If the sun is blazing down, it will be intolerably near, bearing down like a POW camp, a hurricane of pissed football fans and vomiting children forming a human revolving door at the entrance. Either way, entering is an unbearable arse ache, punctuated by flapping RAC men desperate for a single signature on an as yet empty clipboard. The RAC man is a pathetic character because he can be completely neutured by using the phrase ‘I’m already with the RAC’, at which point he has to choose to back down or challenge you to prove you are, the latter being such an unreasonably aggressive proposition that all he can do is look crestfallen and sweaty.

The RAC man is left to stealing small change from other cars

Then there are the kids. Now, the problem with kids is not kids. This is a fundamental misconception. The problem with kids is their parents. Parents are basically normal people who have been given the task of taking an 18-year long exam with a 100% pass mark, and damn it, it’s their summer holidays. Let the kids have a bit of fun, they think. Of course, for those whose entire waking moments are not spent worrying about the welfare of the particular child vomiting/screaming/running at speeds that make Usain Bolt look like a Stannah advert, it is a test of the will of the patience. In fact, the children vomiting/screaming/running are not the real worry.

Don't let them go

It is the malevolent Damiens slowly clawing away your tolerance that grate the most. A few examples: the child who sits in the massage chair without paying, at which point the massage chair swings a great big red light and starts beeping like a drunken pleb, presumably to embarrass the unpaying occupant. Not an issue for the kid, who begins to bounce on the chair with an inane grin. Or the young lad with the bucket and spade who can’t wait until he gets to the beach to use them. Lacking in rudimentary bucket and spade associations such as sea and sand, he instead resorts to bashing the bucket as hard as he possibly can, accompanying it with some kind of tribute to mid-nineties Morrissey. Finally there is the silent vomiter. These are the children who will stand, quiet, for quite some time before, unmoving, vomit directly into the path of unsuspecting passers-by.

You'll need this sawdust

As if these challenges aren’t enough, there is the other side of the scale: the elderly. Old people are fantastic – they have experience that we should treasure, they should be exalted to the ends of the earth and treated as kings and queens… except when they clog up service stations with interminable decision making. Despite sporting glasses that could quite happily focus the sun’s rays into a deadly laser, it is only when they reach the till that they begin to chat about exactly what they want, squinting at the menu board like it’s algebra. The queue for the Costa Coffee often looks like a doctor’s waiting room by around midday. The other problem with the elderly is their incapacity to react with any rapidity to the movements of others, human traffic cones that occasionally make slow sideways movements like giant chess pieces, blocking any sensible path to the toilets.

Look at them. Laughing at you. Standing still.

And it is very, very important to be able to get to the toilets after sampling any of the on-site delights. Tucking into anything from the shop’s fridge section is akin to the Russian roulette scene from The Deer Hunter; you never know when it’s going to be you. Still, it’s better than visiting the petrol station, which during summer looks a lot like a Philip K Dick nightmare. Human beings automatically become incapable of efficiency when pulling into a petrol station. Rudimentary acts like putting wallets in pockets or putting seatbelts on take months, sometimes years. Massive packets of sweets half-melted in the failed air conditioning of the forecourt convenience store force drivers to give way or face writing off their cars.
All of this in an, if lucky, stifling heat. After all, it’s summer, and no one wants to go on their summer holidays in the rain.