King of the road

When i first met wife she told me she liked travel, eating out and expensive shopping trips. So I took her to some motorway services.

Of course not. That's clearly a joke.

But it does sum up the basic consituents of the motorway service station. For some of you, they may be something you see once or twice a year, but for me - a Devonian married to a Scot, and living in Yorkshire - motorway services become a part of many many trips around the country.

I've developed a real snobbery to them. There are ones I will actively seek out (Oxford Services on the M40, 3 good eateries and a Waitrose) and others I will avoid (Leicester Forest on the M1, the toilets are always like the ones at Glastonbury on the 4th day of the festival).

I know they are expensive, I know they are purely designed to suck your money but walking round the farm shop at Westmorland in Cumbria (the only independent services in the UK) or marvelling at the 1960s derelict tower North of Preston makes me oddly patriotic to these places. They're almost mini-worlds, the places you imagine the country would like after a nuclear war, a post-apocalyptic Ginsters paradise with fruit machines.

My fave story involving Frankley services (Southbound, top of the M5) was the time I drove a convertible car on a sunny day. I needed suntan lotion, else my massive head would burn in the sun, but nowhere stocked it on the motorway, and they didn't have baseball caps.

So I ended up buying a Burger King breakfast just so I could get something free to shade my head with.

Yes, it was a Burger King crown and I had to take it off after 5 minutes for fear of the police stopping me. "Is everything alright sir?" "I think you'll find, officer, that should be 'Is everything alright, your highness'"

I'm off to Glasgow tomorrow and (well obviously) I'll be taking M62 (past Birch), onto the M61 (Bolton) and then onto the M6 (too many to name). Some of the stops will be akin to dropping in at a friends house, admittedly one where they insist I pay for everything I want to do - and others will be passed by with nothing but the middle finger shown to them.

Jack Kerouac, eat your heart out.