Losing me bottle? That’s fake news...

HOW does fake news start? On a trip down south on Sunday I pulled wearily into a Greater Manchester motorway service station. Bleak. Very bleak.

After three days of an Indian Summer, such a place, in a horizontal rain deluge, possesses less warmth or soul than a Trump/Bojo post-Brexit party playlist .

As I walked in to pay for me diesel and sell-a-kidney expensive cup of tea, I was struck by the dynamics of the relationship between the two men on duty behind the till.

Instead of the usual kind smile of people doing their best to earn a crust in a job that wouldn’t be their ideal choice ( big respect to all such folk, everywhere) – I soon realised that the older of the assistants was trying to impress the other by being a bit of a smart Alec with the customers .

Each punter was treated to a slightly off-colour remark by this grotesque double act – a sort of low rent sub-standard Steptoe and son.

It’s a scenario I’ve seen repeated many times in the zero hours, zero prospect employment wasteland of our post – industrial, post – Brexit society.

This ‘elder statesman’ of the pair was called Darren. He was clearly in his early fifties, although his name tag alone placed him on a primary school register in the late seventies or early eighties.

I’d also wager, judging by his subsequent cheeky wassock-like behaviour, that he probably sat near the back of the class, was never picked as a reader in assembly and spent the whole of his secondary school career digging the gardens with the other headbangers.

With his greying mullet nodding sagely, he was acting as a sort of unofficial mentor to the spotty, callow youth next to him. Let’s be clear, this older gadgie wasn’t some sort of Gaffa, supervisor or boss man. He was clearly the young lad’s equal or co-worker; they were officially doing the same job. That, however, was not how Darren saw it.

I call it ‘Del boy’ syndrome when an older person – who has clearly not set the world on fire with their dynamism, winning persona or career path trajectory – ends up trying to give unwanted life skills advice to a gullible youngster trapped in the same job.

This would probably have been be the fate of Donald Trump if he’d not had his dad’s money behind him. Again, I must make a clear distinction between people who take jobs they are over-qualified for in order to support their loved ones – and eejits like Darren who couldn’t be trusted to secure the latch on a Nettie door.

Darren’s slightly smug showboating in front of a pair of attractive young twenty-something ladies (which reminded me of a Romeo waltzer operators who only bothered spinning the cars with the lasses in them) turned into a barely concealed smirk of contempt when he saw the next customer was a bloke of his own age. Me.

I normally feel comradeship with fellow seventies childhood survivors; we diced with death by playing with clackers, chopper bikes and meths burning toy traction engines.

We travelled in cars with no seat belts and played out unsupervised till dark. As he smugly passed me my change, he asked me If I collected the points his chain of multinational petrol stations offered.

Maybe I had the appropriate phone app? He did it in a condescending manner which suggested that he doubted I was capable of such wizardry given that I was in my middling years.

Givowwer – the cheeky Gallagher brother sound alike had pushed this radge too far. I did what any self respecting man of my age would do.

Nowt! Aye, I said nowt, smiled through gritted teeth and fumed inwardly. The man who has vanquished hundreds of hecklers over the decades , meekly walked away .

Why do we bottle so often in the face of numptydom? Never mind – human nature has a way of dealing with the pain... The magic kicked in, so that by the time I reached Leeds, all the witty, cutting comebacks that I could or should have said to him, belatedly came flooding lucidly into my consciousness.

Even better, by the time I reached Washington services, they had actually morphed into what I was going to tell people I actually HAD said.

By the time I got home, the bloke had been left sobbing by my rapier wit and sardonic verbal ripostes. In fact, I’ve now utterly convinced myself that the start of this article is fake news and that the last bit is what actually happened.

A career in politics awaits?