Made without care or love

flat white

Travelling home on the M4 I stopped at Membury Service for a coffee. I went to the Starbucks and ordered a flat white. I was drinking “in” but it still came in a paper cup and they also charged me 5p for the “privilege”.

I find that quite frustrating, I wanted my coffee in a china cup, but they didn’t do that, so I had to have a paper cup, and then I get charged for it. I guess I should remember this, and bring my own cup in the future. Hmmm, it was a motorway service station, not a regular haunt for coffee.

I watched the coffee being made, it was more of mechanical automated process for making the coffee and then there was a lackadaisical carefree approach to the heating and frothing of the milk, which was then added to the coffee without any care or love.

It’s not as though I had much of a choice of where I could go for coffee, and I thought for £3.40 I was getting ripped off. It did feel that it was not much better than the (instant) coffees you got years ago from cafes across the country, before the rapid growth of coffee chains like Starbucks and Costa filled our high streets.

Maybe I need to find some independent coffee places just off the motorway instead of stopping at the services. Having said that, the coffee at the Gloucester Services on the M5 was quite good, but that is on the M5, so not on the M4 or the M6, or the M25.

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