Microwavable hamburger? Yep. Yes. You can get those too. And we still can’t stop ourselves, says Stuart Heritage
The doughnuts were on the counter… and you’re only human
1 Bad sunglasses. All of this is part of driving’s romance. 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.
2Unexpected sweets in a packet. 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.
3 Paracetamol, albeit by a brand you don’t recognise, containing dangerous levels of caffeine.
4An attachment you can plug in to your cigarette lighter that acts as an LED light source. 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.
5A pack 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.
6A pasty made by my own brand, with a ridiculously low amount of filling. It could be described as a pastry ball.
7 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.
8One tube of Pringles you believed you were able to eat safely while driving at 60 MPH. You will never do that again.
9 You get more screen washer than you can ever use, and it comes in a sealed bottle that’s designed to drip all over your boot.
10Microwavable hamburgers, sometimes bought late at night. They are cooked from bulletproof glass behind the eyes of a petrol station worker who is disgusted by you. Bonus points if it’s still frozen in the middle.
11The furry mitt is as useful as an ice scraper on a cold morning.
12 Make Pop Its. It’s two hours in to a five-hour journey. They promise their children that novelty Pop It will be the last thing they complain about. So you cave in and purchase one. It doesn’t work.
13A to Z. A-Z.
14Bag of firewood. This is actually a fabrication. In the entire history of petrol stations, no one has ever purchased a bag full of firewood. They are therefore always plentiful on the forecourt.
15 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.
16 Petrol? Maybe… I don’t know about this one, it sounds like a bit of a stretch.