Happy Eaters

As you drive against the rain, churning through the spray thrown up by the implacable bulk of the lorries, they emerge as a shivering, glistening form on your windscreen.  Late at night, as you push the small patch of light from your headlights into the the tunnel of blackness, they loom out in front of you like leering nightmares.  Even their names are provocations, suggestive of late night films, of crazed, cleaver-wielding midgets and horrible, grinning things from the pit.  Little Chefs and Happy Eaters.

From the outside they look like one of those isolated diners in a Hopper painting of Nowheresville.  There is a hard light which falls through the windows into the puddles lying outside.  It always seems to be raining when you enter them, or cold and windy - as if they cannot offer true shelter unless the elements validate their function.  As you enter, you notice that there are few people, and that those few serve only to emphasise the absence of others.  Waitresses lean listlessly against the counter, eyeing you superciliously, suspiciously, as if customers were the last thing they expected.

And yet, for all that, these roadside restaurants exude a feeling of calm.  Along with the bright lighting, there is warmth here; the colour schemes are upbeat, with swathes of strong primaries.  Everything is neat and tidy - oppressively so.  They are bastions of order; they are the present-day equivalents of the square-shouldered castra which the Romans placed along their roads, affirmations of a kind of civilisation.

But the effect of these eateries is stronger than that.  They are not just warm, safe havens, outposts of comfort in a wet and dark world; they are immediately reassuring as only the truly familiar can reassure us.  And they are familiar - even though we may have never set foot there before - because they are all identical.

Wherever you go, you find the Little Chefs and Happy Eaters of this world.  Step inside, and you step into all of them.  The colours, the designs, the food; the patterns are repeated perfectly.  Even the waitresses look like mass-produced clones, the same clash of Have-a-nice-day Miss America uniforms with the defiantly morose Tesco Traceys within.

Because these places are everywhere, and everywhere the same, they are, in effect, nowhere.  Stepping into them is like leaving the map.  This is their function.  They offer the weary traveller, whom time seems to have abandoned, the chance to opt out of the journey for a while.  They stand as the negation of the whole business of travelling.  Which is why they mock us as we drive past them.  Look, they seem to say, you are not here, you are travelling still; endlessly, pointlessly.  They are like silent seductive sirens calling Odysseus bound to his mast.

As they mock us for passing them, so they bless us in using them.  Hence the strange, de-personalised look of beatification on eaters' faces.  Their minds have left their bodies, which remain hurtling along the road; here they have found a transcendent peace.  O happy, Happy Eaters.

(8.11.87)

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