With roadworks wrecking her planned journey, KATHERINE MACALISTER pulls in at a well-known bastion of Britishness

It was closed I tell you. Closed. How you can close the A34 – accidents aside?

Because any work that needs doing they would do at night. They wouldn’t shut the main arterial road out of Oxfordshire, There would be men in yellow coats to direct us.

Not a bit of it. A yellow sign announced the closure at Didcot with a diversion sign signalling that we were to go back up the A34 without saying where to, so we all got off at every side road to try to reconnect – anywhere to get down south where our relatives waited with laid lunch tables.

But whichever way we turned there was no way through. Chilton and Wantage were gridlocked. The road to Reading was a car park. Harwell resembled Bluewater on Christmas Eve.

Like whippets on a race track we tried every blind alley, children wailing in car seats.

Eventually I spied a man in a yellow coat. He said we were supposed to divert up to the M40 and then go to the M4.

“When is the A34 re-opening?” I asked him. “It’s closed all weekend.” ALL WEEKEND. It was as if the world had gone mad.

“How about the train then?” my children piped up. It wasn’t a bad idea as Didcot goes to just about everywhere by rail. We leapt out at Didcot Parkway but we missed the train.

The next one would involve three changes and an evening arrival and after a day chasing our tails I headed home.

So there we were despondent and starving. Right – food. “Where do you want to eat? We can go anywhere – even McDonalds?” I said, proving how desperate I was. “No, we don’t like it there,” was their surprising answer. Gathering hope I reeled off a list of all my favourite places but instead they came back with: “We want to go to Little Chef.” As if my day could get worse.

“We can have pancakes and milk shakes and they play music in the loos and have clouds on the ceilings.” So they do, I thought, beyond caring.

So we pulled into the Weston On The Green franchise, having not been there since it was refurbished last year. It looked less shiny, the staff more weary, less enthusiastic than last year. But after that day, prison food would have been welcoming.

A nice lady who called me ‘duck’ led me to a red booth and gave us the plastic menus, crayons for the kids and left us to it. The kids ordered the hot dog and the pizza (main and dessert is £4.98) and I had the all day early starter breakfast (£6.29) and tea (£2.29 a pot). What I needed was to be wheeled off and sedated but they didn’t provide that.

The food was terrible, not a vegetable to be seen. The hot dog was dry, the chips unremarkable and the vanilla milkshake (£1.60) tasted scented and she wouldn’t drink it. The tiny pizza was more of a success but the babycino (80p) – what we thought was a hot chocolate – turned out to be frothy milk in a cup.

The breakfast was better although the beans came in such a tiny ramekin it barely covered half a piece of toast. The grilled tomatoes were hard and cold on the inside, but it was breakfast at 3pm, and I was grateful.

The pancakes were more of a success and swamped in so much maple syrup, they needed a life raft, but I could hardly complain at a bill of £20.94.

As we made our way home I reflected that Little Chef is there for exactly those moments, when you are tired and hungry, when you have nowhere else to go, when comfort food is the only way forward and when someone who calls you ‘duck’ nearly reduces you to tears. It’s a roadside beacon of Britishness but if were you I’d stick to the pancakes and a cup of hot tea.

  • Little Chef, A34 North, Weston on the Green, 01869 351169