Microwavable hamburger? Yep. Emergency birthday card? Those too. And we still can’t stop ourselves, says Stuart Heritage
- Bad sunglasses. This is all part of the romance of driving. You leave when it’s cloudy, get blinded by the sun, stop to buy some shades and arrive looking like a half-melted waxwork of someone from The Matrix.
- A packet of instantly disappointing sweets. You wanted Haribo, but they’ve only got some suspicious-looking jelly worms that taste of nothing and were made on an industrial estate around the corner.
- Paracetamol, albeit by a brand you don’t recognise, containing dangerous levels of caffeine.
- A sort of LED thing, maybe a fan or something, with an attachment that you plug into the cigarette lighter. You bought it five years ago, and you’ve forgotten what it’s for, but it has a suction cup on it so it must be useful.
- A packet of chocolate-filled doughnuts. Nobody knows when they were made, nobody knows where they came from, but they were on the counter when you got there and you’re only human.
- An own-brand pasty, containing such an embarrassingly small amount of filling that it would be more accurate to describe it as a pastry balloon.
- An emergency birthday card, chosen from a very limited range, which explains why your father is getting a ‘Happy anniversary darling’ card from you this year.
- A tube of Pringles that you thought you could safely eat while driving your car at 60mph. Never again.
- More screen wash than you could ever use in a lifetime, sold in a bottle expressly designed to leak all over the inside of your
- A microwavable hamburger, often bought very late at night and cooked for you frombehind bulletproof glass by a petrol station employee who hates you. Bonus points if it’s still frozen in the middle.
- An ice scraper in a furry mitt that is genuinely about as much use on a frosty morning as a wet fish.
- Pop Its. You are two hours into a five-hour trip. Your children promise that a novelty Pop It is the only thing that will stop them complaining about the journey. You cave and buy one. It doesn’t work.
- An A-Z. Because in 2021, who would want to navigate across the country in any other way?
- A bag of firewood. Actually, this one is a lie. Nobody in the history of petrol stations has ever bought a bag of firewood from a petrol station. This is why there are always so many of them on the forecourt.
- A full week’s worth of food shopping that you decided to buy while your car was holding up a pump, then made the checkout assistant bag up for you, to the obvious fury of everyone else who just wanted to quickly pay for their fuel.
- Petrol? Maybe… I don’t know about this one, it sounds like a bit of a stretch.
