Heading up to the Lake District today for the second leg of my holiday, which involves a caravan, a couple of tents and my mum, dad, brother and niece. I am going camping. I feel I am unlikely to feature in the pages of Hello magazine in the near future.
In the menÂ’s toilet in the BP garage at Lancaster North services on the northbound carriageway of the M6 someone had made an effort to brighten things up. About three quarters of the way up the wall above the sink was a quite fancy, twirly holding device made of metal. Within its rings someone had placed a plastic pint glass about a quarter full of dirty water. In this water they had then added a raggledy bunch of yellow carnations. Admittedly some of them were more brown than yellow as they had passed their prime. And a couple of the carnations had fallen on to the urine sprinkled floor.
Although I appreciated the effort it did seem a slightly jarring image. Who had done this and why? The holder looked like it was intended to hold some kind of decoration, possibly even a jar of flowers, but the plastic pint glass seemed an inappropriate receptacle. And the flowers themselves should have been binned at least two or three days ago. So was this an attempt to brighten up the lives of male motorists who needed to get petrol and use the toilet and were travelling north, possibly to Carlisle? Or was it some kind of situationist art installation designed to highlight the grottiness of the lavatory? You’d think if the staff had put the flowers in to cheer us up, that they would have changed them when they started to rot and tidied up any flowers that fell on the floor, or at least that they would have put the flowers in a vase. So the pint glass, the dirty water and the dead flowers must surely have been put in by someone not connected with BP, who (possibly on an earlier trip) had noticed the swirly metal holder and thought, “What can I put in that?”
On their next journey they had brought the pint glass and some flowers that their wife (or boyfriend if they were gay – not that all gays love flowers, I’m just trying to be politically correct and accidentally proving that I am not) and then arranged them deliberately badly in this offensive way.
Because they knew exactly what effect this would have. Men would come into the toilet, notice the flowers, think “Ah, nice touch, good old BP. Not the evil oil exploiters we thought. That’s really cheered me up!” Then they would go for a wee or a poo or a wank or some sex if they were gay (see above) and then when they came back to wash their hands they would look at the flowers properly, see that they were dead and in a pint glass and strewn over the floor. This would bring them down to earth with a bump, they would realise that far from being in some kind of swish posh toilet that had flowers in it, they were in an unpleasant khazi at Lancaster North services (not even the one in the services, the one in the garage) and that this thing of potential beauty, like all things in their life, was rotten and ugly and dead and swimming in fetid water that probably had some faeces in it.
They would leave the toilet much more unhappy than when they came in and consequently decide not to buy an overpriced bottle of diet coke and a Special K bar and in fact never visit a BP garage again.
If you think about it it is the only explanation. And for me at least they succeeded.
I would be interested to hear though if the flowers are a regular feature, so if youÂ’re passing by (and are a man, gay or heterosexual) then do have a look and drop me a line.
Be prepared to have your will to live destroyed, however.
