Colin's November Column

Ewan and Charley sitting around a campfire with some tribesmen. Flickering black-and-white rockers racing from the Ace Café up to the next roundabout and back before the record has finished on the jukebox. Arnie walks into a hairy biker bar, crunches a few bones, nicks a Harley and the riding gear to go with it.

OK, forget about the last one – it’s not quite the positive image I’m looking for. But what links all these manifestations of the biker dream – and countless others – is the central role played by eating and drinking places. A quick espresso before getting back on your Vespa to buzz through the Rome traffic, a warming roadside burger after a chilly early-morning start in late summer, parking your 916 on a pavement outside the hotel bar as the sun sets after a long day in the saddle… Lovely.

And then you come to the glories of the Great British motorway service station. Part of me actually quite likes these places, which present huge people-watching opportunities for the amateur anthropologist. But most of me doesn’t, and I think it’s not controversial to suggest that I’m in the majority in not being impressed by your Motos, your Welcome Breaks and the rest.

There’s a cottage industry of books and websites that exist to suggest alternatives. For the last few weeks I’ve been carrying around one such book, called Near the Motorways, by Hugh Cantlie, published by Cheviot Books.

It’s good enough, as far as it goes. But it’s no more and no less than a guide to pubs that do food, arranged according to their proximity to the motorway network. The various guides published by the Campaign for Real Ale have done pretty much the same job for a long time now.

The problem is, you usually don’t want a pub. Although superficially appealing, a pub – especially one fancy enough to do nice food – will tend to be too cramped, too boozy and too time-consuming for your purposes. The food-and-drink aspect of a mid-journey break is important, but it’s far from the only challenge. You need somewhere to fiddle about with your rucksack, to clean your visor, to check your map and – in bad weather – to warm up and dry off.

Plenty of people reckon the answer is garden centre cafes, or supermarkets. The latter in particular are open long hours, they’re much cheaper than motorway services, the staff aren’t going to bat an eyelid at your bike gear, and they have the extra benefit of selling a load of other things if you realise you’ve forgotten something for the journey.

That seems to be covered by a book called The Great Motorways Secret, by Stephen Addy, which focuses on supermarkets with cafes. A book, however accurate when it goes to the printers, will struggle to stay up to date, though.

Some sat navs can list eating and drinking places, but in my experience they are rather selective. And most of us haven’t got sat nav. A lot of us have got smart phones that could make use of an app that locates a suitable place, but ideally you’d need the info to be available as you ride along, without having to stop and get your phone out, and hope you’ve got a signal.

The technology and the necessary information all exists, but someone needs to put it all together in a biker-friendly format.