I live near a motorway service station, one that has – contrary to expectation – an excellent reputation and the framed certificates to prove it. We local yokels take it for granted that it will be open 24/7 apart from Christmas and New Year, and it does offer bizarre sights that add to the interest of our peaceful, cheery (insert platitudinous adjectives here) rural lives.
A trip across the petrol forecourt, specially on weekend evenings, is notable for scantily clad personages (I really can’t call them Ladies) wearing pink bunny rabbit ears, fishnet tights and cottonpuff tails as they stagger from coach to loos and back. My daughter tells me they are probably en route to Blackpool or Morecambe for a hen party. I feel sorry for poor Morecambe, but at least they won’t be staying here to scream their drunken obscenities – and that’s just on the outward journey.
One evening last year, when I was driving peacefully homeward past the service exit, I encountered a kilted bag-piper heel-and-toeing along the grass verge with his pipe and drones in full voice. Once I’d shaken myself and decided it wasn’t an apparition, I approved his choice of rehearsal room – the open air. Mind, it was possible that his fellow passengers (or his employers) had forced him to relocate. Confinement indoors with a set crying come-to-battle is a form of torture that even the deafened disco generation might find it hard to tolerate. Bagpipes are outdoor instruments. (Or should that be, The bagpipe IS an outdoor instrument? Someone please tell me.)
The arrival of winter was marked again this year by the lady and gent who walk a team of huskies. They always appear to be northbound, but I could just have missed their return trips. Snow sometimes follows, though I wouldn’t dare to assert that there is any connection. And I’ve never seen them wearing anything red or furry.
Sue Millard - Jackdaw E Books. Horses, history and humour (not necessarily in that order) and general witterings; some vaguely literary, mostly rural. I live in Cumbria in Northern England.
2 comments:
Sue, I think the couple with those huskies stayed at our B & B ages ago. Seriously: we had a pet-friendly B & B and I used to get dizzy trying to keep track of all the black labradors and Jack Russell terriers: the huskies really stuck in my memory, and boy, were they furry.
Love the ladies in fishnets and rabbit ears. They don't sound as much like ladettes as they do bimbettes, so the drunken obscenities surprised me.
And I'm stumped about the bagpipes question. I'll get out my Quirk and Greenbaum and try to find the answer for you!
Is it my age ? I tend to recoil in horror at the very thought of such things as stag nights and hens' parties.
On the other hand , I could perhaps happily perve on the passing sets of fishnets adorning the Playgirls .
Highway service stations are a very mixed bag in Oz . Avoid the ones with lot of trucks outside and lots of tattooed truckies inside.
As for dogs . The people living near my daughter own a silvery coloured husky - Japanese breed , I was told , but it is rather too narrow in the head for my liking . It's also quite mad .
Other people living near ourselves among these units have a small Japanese dog , ( I cannot remember the breed ) which is a much more pleasant little pooch , toddling about on a body harness .
I usually wave to it from our swimming pool as it passes
Brian
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