Little Chef shrinks further

(I have to declare an interest here. One of the best meals I ever had, in my life, was in a Little Chef. It was on the return trip of a road-trip to Wales, many years ago, and I had burger and chips. With the chips the waitress brought sauces in little individual paper cup-cake cups. One for tomato sauce, one for mayonnaise, one for mustard. I thought this was the height of sophistication at the time. Looking back I realise…it is the height of sophistication! Fresh sauces to dip your chips in, what luxury! Okay, maybe it had more to do with the circumstances of the trip or how hungry I was, but whenever I dine somewhere that doesn’t meet expectations I think to myself - ‘it’s okay…but it’s no Little Chef’.)

I bloody love ‘The Avengers’. I especially like the ones where eccentric, embittered Old School/Colonial types feel that society is going to the dogs and that the only sane response is to hatch some completely barmy scheme to control the weather or something and so restore a decent way of life. This is normally resolved by Steed and Emma kicking the crap out of the villains. Sometimes champagne is involved, which is always nice.

Lately though, I’ve been starting to see things from the villain’s point of view. It really does seem that society is under attack - from those that are hungry for profit rather than the all-day breakfast. These are the same people who celebrate mediocrity, and who brand excellence as ‘eccentric’ - which means that it’s easier to appeal to the lowest common denominator. Hence the rise of BK and McDs and the decline of the Little Chef.

Nostalgia time: Ah, the golden age of motorway travel, when cars were huge steel boxes with back seats like sofas. A car journey back then was an adventure and a stop at a Little Chef was a treat, not least because the price of the food was roughly equal to the GDP of a developing country. Back then, in-car entertainment was squabbling with siblings and being car-sick. If you didn’t arrive at your destination with bruising all down your arm and chunks in your hair you just weren’t trying. Of course navigation was simpler then too, no need for GPS, just the AA book of the road if you were posh or Dad’s unfailing sense of direction if not. Or you could use a Little Chef map. Cunningly, these showed all the Little Chefs in Britain, even though this meant omitting the occasional detail, like Stonehenge, or Birmingham.

Eating on the road today is a simple choice - you either pack a lunch (advised) or, if you’re stopping on the motorway, you have a BK, McDs or KFC (not to be advised). None of these, by the way, offer the option of ‘flask tea’ as a beverage. It’s all ‘freshly brewed’ - do these people have no idea at all of what travelling should mean?

The Little Chef was a half-way-café between the restaurant and the caravan-in-the-layby. It was where businessmen could break their journey and eat a hearty, artery-clogging meal then wrestling indigestion for the next 200 miles before wowing them at a sales conference in Peterborough.

More than that, it was an oasis. You could imagine poets idly composing as they rested between hitched lifts, or bands resting up as their knackered transit steamed and rusted outside. Can you imagine any of that in a McDs? I can’t imagine poetry being written in McDs, txt mssgs maybe, but not poetry. Nor can I believe it is conducive to romance - I bet many a mistress was met in a Little Chef and many a secretary woo’d by an expense account all day breakfast.

Okay, there has been the occasional fiasco - there was that rather ugly review where it was revealed that Little Chef omelettes came in kit form (rather than an egg, or even just a hen and some patience) but overall it would appear that excellence is once more being traded for mediocrity.

Well screw that, I’m not standing for it. I’m off to the roof of the castle to continue my weather experiments.