Days without alcohol 72
I am spending a significant proportion of my time in service stations this month. It is something I have written about in my latest
New Statesman article, which plays around with themes I have been knocking about with on here. My basic fidelity to Moto service stations (when the Moto isn't there for me, I will go with any service station that is nearby to me - this is the kind of service station whore I am) means that it remains one of the few constants for me in this tiring few weeks of traversing back and forth around our great country. And the Caffe Ritazza woman acts as the one human being that I can rely on and who I regularly see.
So I was amazed to notice today that in the Caffe Ritazza I stopped in there was a picture of a different woman. How could CR (as all the cool kids are calling it) employ anyone else for this job, that my future wife has been doing so admirably for so long. The new girl is just too obvious and doesn't have the sophisticated beauty of my one true love (this isn't like the time I was in love with the Marks and Spencer model - I am embarrassed about that now - it was just a crazy infatuation with someone unobtainable. I love the CR woman on a pure and spiritual plane). They have got her coquettishly biting on one of those individual wraps of sugar, obviously thinking this makes her look sexy. But nothing could be as sexy as the original CR girl just looking thoughtful and slightly sad, as if she is wondering why I havenât been into the caffe for a while and hoping that I haven't run off with some sugar chomping whore. Can I make an appeal to the CR bosses to keep the original and best model. I hope this new development isn't the first step in a permanent replacement. Because I believe CR fortunes depend on the original woman, who I have no doubt has had a similar effect on all solo male travelers as she has had on me.
But if you do phase her out, please send me all the redundant giant photos so I can cover every wall in my house with photos of my true love. Which she might find a bit weird when she finally comes round for the first time. But hopefully she will find a house decorated entirely with three photos of her, repeated over and over again, as flattering rather than deeply frightening. And she'd get used to it over time. And the fact that I actually love her three photos more than I love her. I know what I am getting with the photos and would be confused and upset if she ever exhibited any other emotions in real life.
My other service station obsession is the massage chairs that they have in Moto, which as I said in the NS article, always seem to be situated by the toilets, a somewhat unappealing location, and which also never have anyone using them. Occasionally a child is in one of them, but just jumping up and down and not having put any money in. I have worried for some time that whoever is running the massage chair business must be having a very sad time. I imagine them having gone on Dragonâs Den and somehow convinced the Dragons that this would be a great idea, that weary travelers would want to use, especially if they were in full view of people who were about to or had just urinated or defecated. But now he travels up the motorways, stopping off at each Moto to empty the cash box, to discover, once again, that there is no money in any of his chairs. How his hopeful heart must sink.
Sure enough, today I had a closer look at the chairs and saw that the cash boxes and payment slots had been ripped out, presumably not by some very hopeful but disappointed thief, but by Moto itself. The chairs have clearly been certified obsolete and they have given up on the whole massage idea. For the moment the chairs remain for kids to jump on and old ladies to briefly rest in and for men who like to look at people who have just urinated to use as an inefficient hide. But soon presumably this symbol of business failure will be gone. If Moto would like to send me all the redundant chairs I can put them in my house (not as massage chairs, just comfy chairs), perhaps just outside the toilet. So that I can sit there whenever my future CR wife is going about her business and be there to greet her when she comes out. Or I could just fill every room with the chairs and then the CR woman will not only have the unsettling spectacle of her giant face staring back at her from every wall, but also be in a house where the only furniture is slightly dilapidated, comfy leather chairs. I don't think she'd think I was crazy.
