Hello Everyone,

A few days ago I fled Chateau Blackrobe and the male I share living space with in order to visit my dear friend Red Paula in the windy wastes of the North.  This visit was of a therapeutic nature – because I was pretty convinced that one more day spent with the contrite male I share living space with would result in my murdering him, or me having a nervous breakdown.

Now my dear friend has escaped the rat race down in London and has disappeared into that time warp known as Cleethorpes.  It is mighty strange, but in my view, the space/time continuum has a tiny hole somewhere on the A16.  This hole is located near Boston (the real Boston, not the new one in the US of A).  Once past Boston, the roads seem to get quieter and everyone seems to chill out a bit and generally not take life so seriously. The houses are not all done up like they are down south, stuff gets sold on roadsides and you rarely see a police car – which is, in my view, a very good thing.

I decided to take the male who I don’t share living space with along for the ride and as he is a bloody foreigner, also decided to improve his knowledge of all things Englihs whilst we were at it and show him a little of the darker underbelly of English society while we were on our travels.

I picked him up from the airport and decided to improve his working knowledge of the English caff before we passed through the hole in the space/time continuum.  We headed off to the Stibbington Diner – located on the A1 near Stamford in Lincolnshire – please see picture above.  This cultural icon is one of the few independently owned diners on a british major road.  The rest have been taken over by big chains such as Little Chef and Travellers Rest.  Not only are the chains expensive, but the food is also crap and their main aim is not feeding and watering the weary british traveller and taking care of the even more weary british commercial traveller – their main aim is liberating as much of your money is possible from your pocket from virtually the identical second you get out of your car.  They have fruit machines, video arcade games, MacDonalds bars, wildly expensive shops and that is before you even get into the café – where it costs a ridiculous amount of money to have even the most basic of sandwiches and a cup of coffee.

The Stibbington is entirely different, it has a huge car park, an even huger lorry park, nice clean loos, showers for the weary travellers (of either the pleasure or commercial variety).  The food is freshly cooked, cheap and full of lots of lovely cholesterol and the fixed seats in the dining area are positioned to accommodate even the most generous of lorry drivers’ bellies.  The male was feeling a bit peckish, so he stoked up on a full English breakfast with extra chips.  Now I strongly suspect that the male had an operation when he was a baby and a doctor took out his stomach and put in a black hole instead.  He is a big guy so needs a lot of fuel to keep him going…BUT…the Stibbington English Breakfast with extra chips proved too much even for him!

The lorry park was full of commercial vehicles and there was a sign at the counter in the diner saying that only drivers who had paid to stay overnight in the car park were entitled to have their flasks filled with boiling water for free – everyone else has to pay 50p.

This place brings back happy memories of dawn stops at the Watford Gap services on the M1 as a young traveller in the late 1970’s – nothing much seems to have changed.

Those of us of a certain age sometimes regret the faster pace of life in our globalised culture, the homogenisation of goods and services, the advent of MacDonalds and Pizza Hut at the cost of our more local culture and cuisine.

England is not the place it used to be.

However, to mangle a quote from Rupert Brooke – ‘there is a corner in these foreign-looking fields that is forever England’ – and the Stibbington Diner is that corner. Long may it survive.

The male and I continued our journey, fortified for what lay ahead….

Portia

xxx