the beauty of motorway service stations
When I look back at my life, I see that most of it has been spent in between different motorway service stations. These islands of amenity, in the harsh petrol rivers that are the nation's arteries, are strangely cut off unreal places, unreachable by foot. Cheap, and even more rubbish than McDonalds, junk food, overpriced soft drinks, Best of the Eagles compilations and long distance lorry drivers buying porn: all these have formed part of the motorway service station culture over the years.
How many times have you stopped, in limbo between A and B, at one of these oasis' of calm? How many school trips have they punctuated, how many journeys to rock festivals, how many nirvanas of eagerly awaited urinals have they provided? How many twenty pence coins have you put into arcade machines under harsh electic light?
Will Self, the infamous badass known for shooting up heroin on the Prime Minister's plane, compares the tracks from injecting opium on his arms to the motorway system of Great Britain in the short story "Scale", but he neglects to mention the grace and elegance of the motorway service station, surely obvious to anyone with a modicum of love in their soul.
There is little on this earth that can emulate the experience of seeing the dawn rise in the vast concrete desert that is a motorway service station car park, not having slept for the past 60 hours. funky mf plans to organise a package tour of these places some time next year: so await further details.
Tobias Flinch
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