England is
empty. Well, as empty as it can be on a sunny Saturday in October. Even the
M25, usually nicknamed the largest carpark in England, is nearly devoid of
traffic. It takes me only four hours to get from Harwich to Devizes and that
includes a stop at a Reading service station for an English breakfast, the
famous heart attack on a plate.
There are
four choices I can make. The ordinary English breakfast, the full English
breakfast, the traditional English breakfast en the really scary-looking
breakfast bap, which looks like a pasty, unbaked bun with a sausage, a rasher
of bacon and a tomato filling.
I decide to
be adventurous and go for the full English breakfast which consists of a rasher
of bacon, no less than two sausages, a grilled tomato, two pieces of fried
bread, a hash brown, baked beans and two fried eggs. Written down like this it
seems much worse than it really is. I decide against the baked beans. I have
never understood why the British enjoy something like that for breakfast. Or
why they think baked beans on toast is tasty. I tried it once, but that was
once too many.
So I tell
the pimply youth behind the counter to leave them out. He stares at me blankly
for a second as if he hasn’t got a clue why anyone can leave out a delicacy
like that, but then it seems to dawn on him what I mean and he asks me if I
would like two have two hash browns instead of one then. I nod, doubting if I
will eat it, but he probably wouldn’t understand if I refused that as well and besides,
he showed initiative and you should never nip something like that in the bud.
He fishes a
few bangers from a tin which is kept hot au-bain-marie, scoops up a rather
greasy rasher of bacon, two pieces of even greasier toast and the two hash
browns, and tops it all off with the grilled tomato. Then he goes to the back
and adds two eggs, after which he covers the plate with a rather dirty plastic
cover. The till is at a nearby coffee counter so I really need the cover to to
keep my breakfast even moderately warm, because lots of people are busy
ordering fancy coffees. Coffees that take ages to prepare, cost a fortune and
taste no better than what I get from the coffee machine at the school where I
work. However, someone, somewhere, must be making a vast amount of money from
selling the stuff. I think I might have chosen the wrong career.
When I
finally have everything I ordered and have paid for it, it appears there is no
cutlery at the next counter. The lady ahead of me complains loudly. Of course,
there should be knives and forks but I don’t think there is any need to vent
this so loudly, particularly not when the guy who has to take care of it makes
every effort to remedy the situation.
When I’m
ready to tuck into my breakfast I can still hear her complain loudly about
everything that’s wrong in this place to her rather browbeaten hubby. She
complains about the food, the taste, the chair she is sitting on and the
temperature in the dining area, which to her taste is much too low. What do you
want, woman? You are in a service station on the M4. Be glad there are clean
loos and more or less hot food.
Granted,
apart from the quantity, the breakfast is nothing to write home about. The
fried bread is much too greasy and tastes faintly chemical, the tomato is unripe
and not hot enough and the rasher of bacon is too greasy. The bangers on the
other hand are absolutely perfect and the eggs are exactly right as well so I
feast on those and leave the rest on the plate. The coffee with which I top everything
off is not bad either, so after my little stop I’m ready to tackle the M4 again
without falling asleep at the wheel. With little regret I leave the woman still
complaining to her hubby. Hey, I know it’s not the Ritz. It’s a motorway
service station and I never expect much from one of those, but it could have
been a lot worse.
The rest of
my journey down into Wiltshire is uneventful. In fact I arrive so early that I
decide to do some grocery shopping in Devizes before going to the farm, where I
rented a cottage. The sun is shining, the roads are mostly free of traffic,
it’s sunny and I have a whole week before me in which to relax and laze about. What
more can anyone wish for?
image: rob de frees
