Best before

by Dan

His regret wasn’t because she was wonderful at her job.

Far from it. With customer service skills that may have been honed by the Stasi, she didn’t give off the image Travelchef wanted in the buffet carriage of their brave post-privatisation world. She left snotty tissues on the work counter and reeked of Fisherman’s Friends which she used to overpower the permanent odour of pasty emanating from her polyester uniform.

One day, whilst secretly standing behind the curtain that led into the Servery’s inner sanctum Phil had heard her deal with a customer query as to why a twin pack of pork pies he had purchased were two months over their Best Before date.

“It was sold as seen and you should have checked at the time, I can’t go giving refunds to every Tom, Dick and Harry” she declared defiantly before turning to busy herself with the till roll.

Phil stayed hidden rather than be forced to deliberate between her and the customer about whether she really was a “hatchet-faced old bag”, but later, after quickly downing three Johnny Walker miniatures for Dutch courage, he issued her with a stern telling-off from which their working relationship had never recovered.

“Your attitude stinks and so do you! Sort it out!!” he’d shouted.

Her subsequent sulk and refusal to attend several food hygiene courses had meant that it was only a matter of time. Cost-cutting recommendations went forward and she was forcibly retired though savings were negligible.

Soon after though he began to feel lonely and guilty for how he had acted. Especially as he now felt a bit of relic himself.

For twenty years, she’d held the fort if he snuck down the guard’s van for a fag and she would always support him in any altercations with customers. They had always understood together that, on some level, that they had a reassuring permanence for travellers, like the graffiti on the black-bricked wall they passed before the tunnel. In some subtle way it mattered to regular customers that these guardians of the curly-ended sandwich were familiar.

The interchangeable agency staff that followed were easier to manage, but each spotty face reminded Phil of the clock counting down on the institutionalised working world he knew. Soon words like Ciabatta, Rocket and Artisan started to creep onto the Menu and the prices began rocketing.

Within three years Phil himself cashed in a redundancy payment and bought a burger van which he ran from a layby near Cirencester until his retirement last week.


One of his first jobs as a man of leisure was to clear a few boxes from the loft.

He soon found a small box off stuff she’d left in the cutlery draw which he’d kept forgetting to send on, her old name-badge, a photograph of them at the British Rail catering awards 1989 and a half-eaten packet of Fisherman’s Friends. It was hard to disagree with its verdict that things had been “Best before Jan 2000.”

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