My favorite roadside cafe

The homogenisation of the high street started with the chain stores moving in and a growing concern that one high street looked much the same as another.  The downside to this was that high streets lost their individuality, the upside was that shoppers could be confident that on a Saturday, they could buy their pick and mix, purchase an LP, rent a VHS or Betamax video, and fail to find the right sized garment in M&S, no matter where they were.
The health of the high street means that comment has turned from condemnation to concern, and the same chain stores that were once criticised are now described as flagships of the high street.  At least you can still be assured that M&S is unlikely to have the right sized trouser for you, as they continue to adhere to the winning business model of making sure their garment rails are fully stocked with unusual sizes and fail to acknowledge entirely the effect that their food range has had on the collective waistline of their clothing customers.
The new uniting factor on the high street is food and beverage outlets.  Where it was once the occasional golden arch or sinister looking bearded fella with a thing about fowls, now it’s coffee galore.  With just so many coffee shops at least the mystery of just why there are so many fucking discarded coffee cups littering the nation is hardly a three piper.
Our food and drink has been homogenised in our town centres, because if you go to a well known pizza place in any town centre you can be reasonably sure you are going to get what you expect when you order, because it’s probably all made and packaged up in an industrial food prep place in Dudley and shipped by artic to the franchise you are in, where it is effectively reheated and presented with a flourish by a local surly teen.
That’s why, if you want individuality, you have to go out of town.  And I don’t mean some gastropub in the Dales where they raise and then bludgeon to death their own goats, I mean roadside cafes.
I love roadside cafes.
My favourite is situated in a quiet layby on an A road not far from a busy motorway junction.  The layby has a screen of trees separating it from the road, but the noise and the pollution are still a feature of the layby.  The café itself is a converted caravan which, like the cook’s apron, probably started life as white.  A union flag flies from an improvised flagpole atop the caravan.
The menu is varied; sausage sandwich or bacon sandwich.  Add egg if you an epicurean or eggycurious.  The bread is white, of a sort not available outside the layby café catering trade.  It transfers the grease from the filling to the fingers, but never loses its consistency, something of a molecular miracle.
If it’s a refreshing drink you require, then you are in luck.  You can have a cold can, not just a can you understand, but a cold can.  You can have tea, or coffee.  Both are served in Styrofoam cups of the sort that were actually banned in 1997 and are not so much non-biodegradable as possessing a half-life.
Sugar if available from a bowl on a ledge.  You can consider the absence of sachets as a nod to the environment if you like, and you can also speculate that the sugar encrusted teaspoon that rests in the bowl is the roadside café equivalent of those lolly type things used to sweeten beverages in hipster joints.  You’re wrong.
The shelf is also where the condiments are housed, and you can tell that this is a classy joint because instead of generic red and brown sauce bottled containing God-knows-what, these bottles are branded, ‘Daddies’.  Possibly like premium brand vodkas in pubs the contents may not match the label, but it’s the presentation that counts.
There is mismatched patio furniture to dine on, but customers prefer to stand, having been sitting all day probably.  There are restroom facilities, just behind that ailing shrub.
You may smoke.
And, naturally, no Michelin stars, two Michelin tyres.

Inspiration

If you’re lucky, there’s beauty all around you.  If you are very lucky, it’s in the mirror too and you can make a living selling make up or clothes that normal people can’t afford or look good in.

There’s an art to appreciating beauty though.  In the appropriately titled film ‘American beauty’, there’s a scene where a boy shows a girl a video of a plastic bag caught in a breeze, endlessly circulating.  This, he breathes in solemn tones, is the most beautiful thing he has ever filmed.  This, 400 people in a cinema auditorium think, is a reflection on the need for American youth to get out more.  It’s at this point that you realise that any movie containing such a scene must be more up its own arse than a video of a rectal exam.  Anyone who has witnessed a plastic bag on the wing in the wild will know that they are not to be trusted and can attack, wrapping themselves round your leg or shoe and leaving you no option but to shake off said plastic bag by doing a ritual dance that, performed in public, makes you look like a one-man Morris troupe.

It does pose the question though, whether true beauty is to be found in nature, in mankind’s creation or, like a plastic bag in an updraft, in a combination of both?

Picture a new cathedral.  Beautiful?  Unlikely.

Now picture a proper Norman job, the sort that took a good couple of centuries to build, where you capped out the building your great-grandfather dug the foundations for and which has stood sentinel over the landscape for a good few centuries.  Fresh carved, gargoyles and grotesques are probably not best described as beautiful but, after a couple of hundred years weathering, the carving that was started by man is finished by nature as the lines and features of the stone are smoothed and, through architectural botox, a building becomes landscape.

And that’s just the outside.  Wait until you get to the gift shop and tea room.

Or not, the thing to do is head straight for the gift shop and pick up a guide to the cathedral, because if not you will spend the rest of your visit wondering what’s the nave and what’s the choir.  Like being able to name every wildflower in a hedgerow (ragwort, bramble, pornmag, tizercan) knowledge of the correct architectural terms for different parts of medieval buildings is something you think you should have, and feel guilty about not possessing.  Like an ethnic friend.

Places, and people, can be described as inspiring.  The Greeks, early market leaders in matters poetical and theoretical, outsourced inspiration to muses.  These creatures were capricious and could be found in various places, oddly enough frequently attractive places that were quiet and allowed a chap to think about what rhymed with ‘trireme’, or how to found a new branch of philosophy that would get you the girls, or just how to fuck goats.  That last one is a bit of a shocker I concur, but these were less sophisticated times and hanging around in a glade can get lonely.

Muses persist to this day.  Usually they are women.  Unusually they inspire men.  Usually they have really, really good cheekbones.  Rarely do they advise on advanced trigonometry or how to romance ruminants, and the world is arguably a poorer place for it.

Other places where inspiration can be found evidently include the bottom of bottles of alcohol, especially if one is a poet.  And stimulants appear to be a common feature, as, given the number of people sitting in coffee shops with laptops open in front of them with the phrase ‘SCENE ONE’ or ‘CHAPTER ONE’ on the screen, followed by a big white space, latte would appear to inspire.

Anyone who has ever picked up a bat, a ball, a pen or a brush has, at some point, probably been inspired by somebody or something.  It can be a moment of genius or a moment of heroism.

And some of those that have been inspired may go on to inspire others, and not even know it, like the master mason who carved the gargoyle.

Who'se the Daddy?

Right!

Let’s be quite clear, I love condiments.

I occasionally consider that food, actual food, is essentially a primitive condiment delivery system (the same way that celery performs two functions; a thousand island dressing long spoon, and a jaunty adornment to your bloody Mary (the acceptable face of problem drinking)).

Condiments represent, to me at least, that moment in man’s evolution after he had tamed the beasts of the field (by cooking them) and the fruits (and veg) of the land (by turning them into alcohol…no, dammit, by roasting them on a Sunday alongside a joint of Beast o’ the Field) but before it all went Captain Titsup and his Carnival of Terror and industrialists instead of cooks started producing food.

(BTFW: Message to all ready-meal makers – I can add my own salt.  Salt is a readily available substance and many English people are quite capable of shaking it onto their food.  Normally before they have even tasted it.)

Condiments come from a golden age of food when people were thinking ‘oooh, these spices are interesting, what happens if I snort some…'

…twenty minutes later, when they had quite recovered, they decided that mixing spices with a vinegar base was a better idea.  And so condiments were born.

My favourite?  Worcestershire Sauce, naturally (see above), but I think a close second would be brown sauce.

It used to be HP Sauce.  Not now.

HP Sauce used to be made in England, it is now made abroad.

I have no problem with foreign condiments.  Tabasco sauce perks up a meal, especially when your host has neglected to mention it is a feature.  Still, who doesn’t sweat at dinner?

But, really?  It’s not EU Sauce, it’s HP sauce.  Houses of Parliament.  It has a history connected with England which if you could be arsed to ask Siri, I am sure she would tell you all about.  Surely this is the sort of thing that the EU invented that thing for food where it can only be made in the area it’s named, like Melton Mowbray pork pies, or some sort of cheese that can only be made by a particular cow in a specific field.

Also, it now tastes different.  And fuck right off if you are of the opinion that every single ingredient, including the bloke that stirred the mixture, was imported and is hence still the same.  It just does.  The same way that Banks’s Bitter took on hints of piss, shire horse piss mind, but still piss, once the brewer changed.

HP sauce is now made in the Netherlands, which may be neither here nor there, but that it is made abroad is, I think, important, because this is something that can raise a sausage to a religious experience.

Every time we sauce our sausages we are hoping for something extraordinary.

I have had a lot of sausages in a lot of places.  Generally the best have been from roadside cafes where I strongly suspect they have their own sauce recipe, which is the dregs from all their previous sauce bottles cut with (oh God I really hope it’s) vinegar.  In which case somebody should market it, although in retrospect the reason the sauces were so good is probably because they had been fermenting in a hot caravan for a while and hence are  a) mildly alcoholic and b) insanely wrong to serve to HGV drivers.

Hey ho.

But to the point.  HP Sauce is polluted.  Not actually, spiritually.  That’s why, when it comes to brown sauce, in the absence of a Roadside Cafe, I go Daddies.

It may possibly be owned by the same people, and made in the same factory, by the same stirrer guy (or lady), but it doesn’t pretend to be something it’s not.

Because a sauce is created to add flavour, not disguise it, and for that reason it needs to be honest.