You are here: home » blogs » Happy Eater

Happy Eater
by Tom Southam | 08/09/09

I’m not really what you would call a ‘frugal’ chap. I do, on occasion, spend money like it rains. As mentioned before I generally try to pay for my music, I never ever check the price of fuel, I am something of a sucker for good packaging in the supermarket, and I have been known to spend over three quarters of my month’s salary on a pair of shoes.

I can’t say therefore that I am ever in the hunt for a bargain. Nor do I want to spend my time haggling with a Moroccan street urchin just to buy some bloody slippers. I say give me the price and I will pretty much pay it. But the experience I had the other day trying to get breakfast at a roadside diner hurt me so much I am going to have to rant about it.

Now, food is food and you have to eat it, especially if you are someone whose job relies on you fuelling your body properly. It never occurs to me to think (let alone worry) about the several hundreds of pounds I estimate I have spent this year in motorway services. The M4, M5, M3, M25, M6. You name the motorway in the UK (not the M8 because it doesn’t exist, or the M17 because that still hasn’t been made) and I will have spent hard earned cash in a service station along it.

My teammate and occasional travelling companion, Simon Richardson, could probably give you a lot more detail on the actual services themselves as I have noticed he has a slight perversion toward motorway services, but that is another story altogether.

The thing is with any of these services, you kind of know what you are getting. A bottle of water twice the price of any supermarket, a sandwich that’ll cost the best part of a fiver and a coffee as hot as molten lava and (if you don’t stipulate that you would like the smallest possible receptacle) it will come in a 2 litre bucket. Really, how do people stomach all that milk? I digress. These servos are what they are and they cost what they cost to get you home after a Prem or a late night crit, no problem really.

But the other morning near Oakhampton just off the A30, while we were down in the West-country (for once) to ride stages 7 and 8 of the upcoming Tour of Britain, we had to have breakfast in what I can only describe as shit. Just shit. Yes… I’m talking Little Chef. I don’t know what the hell Hesten Blumenthal was thinking…

I haven’t had the sad occasion to go into one of these things for quite a while and I don’t think I will ever set foot in one again if I can help it. The restaurant itself looked like the walls were an inch thick in grease, the white paint a dim yellow colour, the posters and notices were all printed up in black and white in Arial font and Sellotaped to the wall – a sure sign that the manager had long since lost any will or hope. The staff were indolent hangers-on at best and then I sat down and saw the prices.

In this particular red plastic hell hole, they wanted to charge me two pounds and twenty of my English pence for two ‘slices’ of toast (that’s ONE actual slice of bread, cut in two just so you know) with butter and jam, three whole pounds for 35 grams of porridge that I’m sure old Oli Twist would turn his scabby little nose up at and another two pounds and ninety five pence for a cup and a half of coffee; sorry cafetière.

Furthermore, we were then informed by our delightful waitress, that they had just run out of cafetières. Amazing, considering we were the first three people in the place that morning, and as far as I was aware, Cafetière’s are not disposable items. Or maybe you get to keep them? And the plates, and the bowls, and forks and knives? As some kind of compensation for the crap that you have just been charged a small fortune for.

It only got worse when I saw what the non riding members of our party ordered. I figured then maybe it’s just that the owners of Little Chef want to gastronomically and financially punish those that like to eat a healthy breakfast. Because if it is a big pile of yellow/brown starch and grease you are after then for only four pounds ninety-five you could have the full English. An indiscernible pile of fried pig-swill, plus a few sphincters, snouts and toe nails barely disguised in the shape of sausages, revolting maybe but much better value than something fancy like a slice of bread and jam.

All I can say really is thank god John paid for our breakfast that morning, as I probably wouldn’t have even saddled up in the Devon fog to ride the stage, and would now instead be wasting away in a cell awaiting trial for an act of vandalism against a roadside eatery. For the record I think I could’ve been let off on grounds of diminished responsibility. I was firstly malnourished and then robbed in broad daylight by said establishment. A very fair cause if you ask me.

<  ·  >