Usually I’ll do almost anything to avoid having to buy something to eat at a motorway service station. It’s not so much that I mind being mugged in broad daylight; that seems to happen all the time. What I object to is being forced to pay four times what something would normally cost and for it to be inedible.

I remember once stopping at a Granada service station. I found myself at the back of a queue of about 10 people standing at the counter. There was only one person serving and she was plainly way outside her abilities.

After what must have been about 10 minutes but felt like 10 years, I got to the counter and ordered a cheeseburger. I didn’t “want fries with it” and I didn’t want a drink with it. I just wanted the cheeseburger.

“How much is that, please?”

“That’ll be £4.50.”

No, really. It was £4.50, which I would have thought was a bit on the toppy side even if it had been edible.

As it was, the resemblance of the object to a cheeseburger was approximately the same as the relationship between an interview with John McCririck and a piece of entertainment. Or an earwig to a giraffe. Or a pile of stale horse-dung to Darcey Bussell. I think maybe you get the idea. It was not a cheeseburger in the conventional sense of the term.

The point, of course, was that there was nowhere else to go. Obviously you could say, “Sod it, I’m not putting up with this”, but the alternative was to go hungry, because this was the only eating place for 25 miles, and the next eating place 25 miles up the road was likely to be every bit as bad, or worse.

They’ve got you — so they put together the worst possible food, with the lowest-common-denominator service and the highest possible prices, and you have to like it or lump it. These days, I always lump it. I fill up my car with fuel at a service station as close as I can to the start of the motorway, and then I don’t stop until I’m off it again. Occasionally I have to stop to take a leak — about the only appropriate thing to do in one of these places.

Grumpy Old Drivers by Stuart Prebble is published by Orion at £9.99. Copies can be ordered for £9.49 including postage from The Sunday Times BooksFirst on 0870 165 8585

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