Not for the squeamish...

So, my last Friday commute didn’t go quite as planned. With the Dartford Tunnel closed the only realistic option was to go clockwise; the long way round. Eight hours later I finally completed the 250-mile journey and collapsed into bed… but sleep just would not come as I relived the worst part of the journey. No, not the crawling, stop-start madness of canned commuters trying to get home, but the hell I witnessed when I stopped at Cobham Services to refuel.

Jean-Paul Sartre said “Hell is other people.” He was being unusually generous. My dear god, what horror. A teeming, steaming, loathsome hive of pointless human garbage, gurning into their KFCs, queuing for their Maccy-Dees and dribbling… everywhere the dribbling. Stuffing food into their gaping mouths, pausing only briefly to time their insertion so that mastication need only be interrupted for a fraction of a second and then swilling it all down with over-sized paper cups of ghastly fizzy, sugary shit. And talking, talking, talking… yabbering inanely away about nothing of consequence.

At first I thought it must have been some sort of coach-trip convention composed entirely of society’s rejects, a useless army of the damned; doomed to roam, like broad-beamed Flying Dutchmen from one service station to another, clogging up Britain’s motorway network like slow moving lumps of lard in the nation’s arterial system, occasionally clumping together in clot-inducing gatherings like this. Was I witnessing a rare convocation of the fatty deposits, or was this a genuine snapshot of how British people really are?

Expressionless, saggy-titted, milch-cow mothers, coping with their demanding cuckoos by becoming vending automatons; wiping and feeding, wiping and feeding. Bored, too-young fathers gazing vacantly into mobile phones far their superiors in every possible measure of intelligence and wandering, aimlessly wandering, to and fro and back and forth and achieving the square root of zero-point-fuck-all. And the children – millions of them, to my eyes – everywhere you could see; mewling, squawking, ugly, pointless packets of piss and puke destined to become just like the herd of parents they accompanied and harried and brought low.

And at what point in history did offensiveness of appearance become obligatory for the under forty-fives? Arse clefts gaping from low slung jeans, or underpants hoist like fat spinnakers in Cowes Week. Back fat bulging from vests and blue veins pulsing feebly beneath translucent, over-stretched, pasty-white breast flesh. Pre-pubescent future criminals with insults temporarily razored into thuggish haircuts and everywhere the never-ending declaration of ignorance – tramp stamp, ‘tribal’ tattoos representing no known tribe on earth.

Where's Wally* (Trick question)

This mess, this mass of pulsating flesh, eating, chewing, consuming, using; sucking up and spitting out and wasting precious oxygen; overwhelming the planet’s resources and tearing out the goodness from the earth… and for what? What an insidious parasite the human race is. I sometimes wonder if the islamists have a point.