Colm O'Regan: End of the road for the good old petrol station 

The traditional petrol station is disappearing fast, and with it human contact and the possibility of finding anyone who actually knows about cars.  Picture: PA

It’s 10.30pm. My wife, the eldest, and I are huddled in blustery darkness in the front of the car, eating a McDonald's at Exit 8 while the youngest snores in the back. We are having a Whale of a Time. When three people eat fast food in the front of a car at night, it’s like every stakeout in every film. 

Petrol stations didn’t used to be like this. We wanted motorways and we got them. 

There are upsides: Wildlife along the verges. Arriving at your destination on the same day you left.

But one thing was lost: The small petrol station.

I don’t hate service stations. During the interim motorways-but-no-service-stations period, I wished for their existence. Who hasn’t felt the panic of running out of fuel halfway between exits, with your sense of place stunted by the lack of passing landmarks? Who hasn’t just made it into the forecourt and imagined your car greedily gulping the fuel like a dog just back from a walk?

The new stations are emporia. Restaurants that serve fusion food. Toilets cleaner than your one at home, with the latest in blueish light hand-drying technology. There are 'playzones' for bored children. PLAYZONES? BORED? In my day we gestured out the back window to persuade those driving behind that they had punctures; we got sick all over ourselves and shortened our parents’ lives with sibling rib-digs. Well… maybe there’s nothing edifying about long journeys in short trousers.

But on those twisty stop-everywhere roads of the past, there were filling stations. You can still see their gravestones in some places — pillars of an ancient civilisation, the last price per gallon frozen in time, signs for a never-happened "exciting mixed-use development opportunity" fading nearby.

These places were a different kind of opportunity. The two pumps; a dog asleep outside; the possibility of sweets being for sale somewhere in the oily darkness, only to discover the Tanora belonged to The Garage Man and the Gobstopper box was filled with spark plugs.

They are disappearing fast. The petrol station where you stop and a bored young lad uncoils himself from a wall. The place where you roll in with a strange rattle in the car and there is someone in there who actually knows about cars. Men who knew the old number plates and whose knowledge was increasingly made redundant with each successive year after 1987.

Now there is very little contact. You can pay at the pump and watch the flow trickle to a gnat’s piss as it approaches the target. The only human interaction now is sometimes a fella will try and chat you up and interest you in a random cheap chocolate offer at the counter. I heartily endorse that kind of up-selling. It’s chocolate. Who doesn’t need four Twirls?

Everyone’s got a favourite petrol station. I asked Twitter, and it opened up a groundswell of opinion. I’m making a mountain out of a molehill to call it a groundswell but there were so many anecdotes of all sorts of places. They ranged from somewhere you can still leave money in a window, all the way up to the famous, late lamented Josephine's of Urlingford. That intergalactic way-station: Truckers, muckers, and fu... Anyway lots of different types of people. People eating four types of pigmeat on the way up to the match and five types of spud on the way home, giving out between mouthfuls about that ‘hoor of a referee’.

Check out what people thought on Twitter. Search for #IrelandsFavouriteFillingStation. As you sit on a stakeout eating Happy Meals, tell your children: It wasn’t always like this.