At the time of writing the UK is cast in ‘anticyclonic gloom’. In the first 7 days of November, our town saw less than half an hour of sunshine. In that same week we watched as global politics, regardless of your affiliation, took a giant step backwards.
Finding joy in our lives is vital. It feels crass to say that this should be a struggle from a position of such privilege. I feel incredibly fortunate not to wake up every day worried that this could be my last, and yet, we allow ourselves to slide into the oppression of mundanity in our own complacency to find joy.
That was a heavy start to an article that is largely about service stations.
The collector mindset is a copilot as we traverse the wide ranging plains of our lives. Never too far away from any situation, or decision we make. Is it an indication of addictive tendencies, or an inner voice calling for fun? I’m not entirely sure, although I’d like to believe the latter of course.
Speak to anyone and you’ll likely learn their coping mechanisms for a long drive. The emerging trend of ‘rawdogging’ (noun. slang. the act of undertaking an activity without preparation, support, or equipment – Collins Dictionary) on flights and other scenarios rejects all coping mechanisms to the point of insanity (not drinking water for example). It does highlight however, whether intentionally or not, the customs which we border on becoming oblivious to until they’re taken away. The restrictions of the pandemic lockdowns shone a similar light on aspects of our life and the comforts we take for granted.
A long drive for me is made far more bearable with the luxury of music. I might save the first listen of a new album or playlist if I know have an extended journey coming up. Alternatively I might use it as an opportunity to revisit some old favourites, allow the cushion of nostalgia to provide some escapism.
At some point along the metaphorical road, I started to have some ironic fun with the one thing that literally breaks up the journey, the need to stop. Perhaps it’s rooted in the running family joke about my late Nan having three set stops on her biannual pilgrimage from Dorset to Cornwall (one per county). A toilet break near Dorchester, a small roadside hut serving sandwiches and tea on an old route through Honiton, then a Little Chef less than a stones throw from her destination. More than just making reference, I think possibly I’ve inherited her behaviour on this (my Cornwall trips tend to be biennial though, sorry Nan).
The amusement I found in the concept of service stations may also have been due to two comedians of my youth. Bill Bailey and Peter Kay. Firstly you have this quote from Bill’s classic stand up show Bewilderness (2001).
“I’m amazed by how compliant people are in this country. They go into service stations – ‘cathedrals of despair’, as I call them – where baseball-capped ghouls of the night lord it over their congealed bean kingdoms, their fried-bread twilights, their neon demi-mondes, tempting you to enter to become them, undead. ‘Ooh, beans on toast, £18.95, very reasonable. Oh no, I’m not going to complain. They probably pump them up from London in special tubes.”
Then there’s Peter Kay’s pilot for his 2000 mockumentary series That Peter Kay Thing. This episode was titled The Services (1998). You can watch the whole thing below. If you haven’t seen it, I highly recommend sparing 24:20 of your mundane life. I still quote the line “don’t be getting a meal” every time Sam and I park up at a service station (she loves me, really).
On a drive to Scotland in 2016 I asked Sam to take a photo of me at every service station we stopped at. I was making a note of each one and giving it a score. It went as you expect to begin with, marginal differences between them, difficult to justify much higher than a three out of five. Then something unexpected happened as we reached the Lake District, we stopped at Tebay.
Be honest, some of you read that name and swooned (the rest of you shrugged I’m sure). For uninitiated, let me explain.. Tebay service station is more of a local garden centre than big chain food court. John and Barbara Dunning opened the site in 1972, when the M6 motorway was built through their farm (I presume they were given advance notice).
Take a look and hear from John Dunning in the video below.
It’s a piece of storytelling that could be its own series, and it is. In 2021 Channel 4 brought A Lake District Farm Shop to our screens. It’s run for two series and a Christmas special. It doesn’t stop there, Tebay’s sister site, Gloucester Services now has its own show, A Cotswold Farm Shop.
What’s your favourite (or least favourite) service station? Let me know below. I’ll be honest, these two from the Westmoreland Group, Tebay and Gloucester (I’ve not yet visited their third site at Cairn Lodge) haven’t just set the bar of my scoring, they’ve totally smashed the competition to the point I don’t rank them anymore.
But someone else does…
We already had a couple of ‘Top Trumps’ decks that sit in both our broader Star Wars and board games (etc..) collections. More recently I picked up this Motorway Service Stations set from Firebox. You can purchase your own set here, they’re currently on offer at £8.49 (thank me later).
Now this is where I incorporate another comedy inspiration from the early 2000s, Dave Gorman. A collecting hero, he travelled the world meeting people who shared his name for his show (and book) The Dave Gorman Collection (you can watch the whole series here). It all started one drunken New Years Eve when his pal, comedian Danny Wallace bet Dave couldn’t meet enough other Dave Gormans to represent every card in a standard playing deck, including the jokers. He did it, well exceeding the total of 54.
I have no intention of playing my Motorway Service Stations card game in the conventional way. Instead it sits in the glove compartment of my car, accompanying us on journeys, with a challenge to visit the sites on every card (trust me, there’s some jokers in this deck too).
I’m not crazy (debatable..), we’re not going out of our way to visit these, it’s just a small satisfaction to be able to tick another off and brings a little fun to the mundanity of motorway drives.
Are service stations a collectable? They sort of remind me of a ‘blind box’ toy, which you purchase not knowing which of a selection of options you’re going to get inside. Sure, the signs on approach “t’services” do display the logos of the various outlets housed on site, but as we’ve found out the hard way many an occasion, normally when banking on getting my beloved vegan ‘LOVe’ burger from Leon, it doesn’t mean they’ll be open…
Even if the service station itself isn’t the collectable, this collection of photos I’ve taken so far are.
Liam Toms 