Services with a smile

A pint of beer.  Lovely.  This is best enjoyed after briskly walking the dogs or engaging in some rewarding manual labour prior to slumping in a chair and sighing.

Whetherspoons, the pub chain famous for selling very cheap beer and for being open for breakfast so that patrons can enjoy a croissant with their cider, today opened their first pub on a motorway service station.

This is, depending on your point of view, a sound commercial decision and a move that will allow weary travellers to have a decent meal at an affordable price prior to resuming their journey refreshed and alert, or madness.  In particular, motorway madness.  And that’s the worst type of madness.  Apart from madness involving power tools.  Or genocide.

Wheatherspoon’s argument for having a pub in a service station – a place where drivers’ pee and guzzle coffee prior to resuming a journey on a very busy road full of speeding traffic – is that this is a place where a motorist can stop and have something to eat and a tea or a coffee or a wide variety of drinks or, if they are drinking alcohol, a sensible amount.

So what’s a sensible amount?  I’ve been on the M40.  A sensible amount of alcohol to drink whilst driving on it is none at all.  A sensible amount to drink when you arrive home after driving on it is a fucking shedload.

Even if the driver isn’t boozing, is a pub breakfast or lunch, which can involve sausage, beans, eggs, double chips and an extra sausage, really the best thing to eat prior to undertaking a motorway journey?  Isn’t the best meal to drive on three amphetamine tablets rattling around in one of those wee paper cup things and a strong coffee?

Those who oppose the opening of the pub argue that THIS IS A PUB IN A SERVICE STATION!

I can’t actually recall the name of the pub, but surely this is ripe territory for a competition.  ‘The Drivers’ Arms’, with the pub sign being a couple of hands on a steering wheel?  ‘The Coach and Party’?

Possibly this is a throwback to the romantic early days of motoring, when roadside coaching inns enjoyed a brief revival as roadhouses, offering beer, fags and hearty fare to weary motorists before all those pesky laws about drink driving or social conventions about smoking a pipe in a car full of infants came into being.  Our roads though, are somewhat different now.

I’m a huge fan of pubs, and I’ve got nothing in particular against the M40, but I’m not sure that a pub in a motorways service station is a great idea.  There are many things that one can usefully do at a motorway service station, but ‘tarry’ is not one of them.

Which makes me wonder about a pub patronised by a transient community.  Or will it be?  Who will be the regulars at the Drivers Arms?  I’m romantic enough to hope that this will be a destination location for those in the locality who fancy a quick drink in convivial company and are willing to toil across the no-mans land, and possibly six lanes of speeding traffic, that surround these places for a pint and some lively conversation.  Possibly these will be the same people who when faced with the question ‘where shall we eat tonight’, don’t hesitate to respond ‘the KFC at the service station…we can get a drink at the pub first’.