What seemed to me a fairly curious sighting on my tour around the UK’s Little Chef sites; Adverts over the Urinals for a company’s paternity tests in the Male WCs in a motorway services. In my mind it links with the trend for sex shops in former little chef sites along the A1 and in some other locations. However, this is apparently big business as, in the increasingly litigious society we live in in the UK, Paternity is liable to matter a great deal in the context of divorce and child support. The website offers a handy set of standardised options including – ‘Children (2) and Alleged father’ or ‘Child and Alleged Fathers (2)’ with a 4 day turnaround or a premium 2 day service. In case you were wondering, yes there is a DadCheckGold, but that’s only suitable for Professionals.

Delving a bit further this seems to be quite a large scale industry now. For example a competitor brand who supply tests for the ‘Jeremy Kyle Show’ have a £4.99 DNA testing kit on sale at Home Bargains, which you send off with a £99 payment to get your results back.

One last couple of stats, while around 4% of children will have a father they don’t expect but about half of of the tests prove that the expected father is not the genetic parent.

It’s amazing what one can learn by looking and questioning, even in the most banal of locations.