The Names of all the Tiny Lanes

This was in the first petrol station I worked in, back when I was living in Worcester doing my English degree. Summer 1998. I had successfully managed to avoid getting a job for my first two years there, so it was with some reluctance that I took a part time job at the petrol station just across the road from where I lived on London Road.
I worked two or three evenings during the week and on Sunday afternoons. Sundays were the worst. I would work from 3:00pm until 11:00pm. In those days we were actually allowed to smoke behind the counter. Even still those shifts dragged by like you wouldn't believe.
There were two of them.
One of them was a large rotund man while the other was a small scarecrow-like creature. Both were of indeterminate age, though I would perhaps put them somewhere in middle age. Late forties, early fifties. They both had learning difficulties of some sort or another and were resident at one of the care-homes in the area. The small scarecrow man was friendly, almost pacifying, while his larger friend, though polite was somehow imperceptibly threatening.
I can't remember what they came in for - snacks, or maybe cigarettes. They always came in together, inseparable friends. One day the larger man asked if I had a book of maps. I pointed out the maps - next to the car care section - and left him to browse. He came up to me after a while and asked if I had any map books which showed 'the names of all the tiny lanes'. His voice was calm and composed as he asked this, his voice reminding me, inexplicably, of a Victorian ringmaster in a strange circus. His eyes were intense and desperate, and he seemed oddly ashamed, as if asking for a peculiar brand of pornographic magazine.
I can't remember whether or not he found what he was looking for, nor what was so vital about the names of all the tiny lanes.
It was an August afternoon, one of those hazy reddened days you get right at the end of the month. Lost in the midst of deep summer, drifting on swan song fever, the season slowing as it nears its end.
This afternoon passed, began to fall into evening. Sometime around sunset I noticed them again, sat by the roadside deep in conversation. The larger man seemed to be explaining something in great detail to the small man. Were they both smoking cigarettes? I want them to be but they probably weren't.
Sunset crept on into forever, and I watched them in the deepening red twilight and imagined them discussing the names of all the tiny lanes as it got darker.
I don't know why I remember this so much but I do.