Clapped out Granada running on pig manure
I’M ambivalent to headline news that the price of fuel has plummeted, while bread rises.
I’d imagine everyone else who doesn’t indulge in petrol sandwiches feels the same.
The fall in fossil fuel costs has little effect on Yours Truly. I only ever put a tenner’s worth in.
Last year, I even cheekily asked a garage attendant for £5 of gas. The spotty youth broke wind in a brown paper bag and handed it over.
With the pandemic slowing petrol sales, both the AA and RAC predicted prices will flatline at £1 per litre.
The predicted hike in bread prices has its roots in a shortage of flour, worsened by a sharp increase in the number of households now baking their own loaves.
Even my wife has started making her own bread, but refuses to divulge her secret recipe.
That information is strictly on a
“knead to dough” basis.
If nothing else, the oil crash has cured my nicotine addiction. The wife has filled our waterbed with petrol to prevent me from smoking between the sheets.
The news has prompted increased activity at the pumps.
“Petrol’s at an all-time low,” shouted one chav triumphantly before driving off without paying.
Predictions of £1 a litre prices are something of a kick in the teeth for my uncle who spent a small fortune converting his clapped-out Ford Granada to run on pig manure.
As a save it scheme, the project was always destined to be flawed. You have no idea how much a sow has to scoff to fill up a Ford Granada.
It’s also no fun for backseat passengers faced with force-feeding the hog apples. Then there’s inserting the pipe...
It’s the second motoring invention that has loudly backfired for my uncle. He forked out thousands patenting a vehicle that ran on hydrogen, but paid heavily for shoddy “branding”. No-one was going to buy a Hindenburg Cabriolet, but hindsight’s a wonderful thing.
It took him a lifetime, but my uncle did eventually hit upon a surefire way of avoiding the fuel crisis. He died.
An RAC fuel spokesman said the latest round of cuts would further lower the average price of petrol, which is now at its cheapest for years.
“The cuts are bringing us ever closer to the £1-per-litre average for petrol,” he added. “Of course, it would be an extremely welcome move for motorists and businesses alike.”
The Daily Mail’s recent article is fine as far as it goes, but the reporter has failed to inform forecourt customers whether they will see the benefits where they really matter.
Are the prices of those toy Ferrari cars, bouquets and bags of charcoal also set to tumble?
On a personal note, that would considerably ease the financial burden of anniversaries and birthdays.
The news is nonetheless welcome following years of steep rises – petrol peaked to such a degree in 2012 Chris Rea was biking home for Christmas.
But, for the life of me – lockdown or no lockdown – I can’t understand why an ever-diminishing resource is dipping in value.
Once a fossil’s gone, it takes an awfully long time to make another. That ain’t rocket science.
Yet prices have plummeted to such an extent that petrol was the cheapest alcoholic drink for families when pubs closed.
Of course, I’m not advocating drinking petrol – my mate became addicted to the stuff and had to attend AA meetings.
Why is it now so cheap? “Perhaps people are making their own,” offered my wife. “It can’t be that difficult. Take some dead animals, wait four million years for them to fossilize...”
Close to 50 years ago, geography teacher Mr Brown assured our class that this world would be purged of oil by the 1990s. He also assured us that Oldham Athletic would win the FA Cup by the New Millennium.
In hindsight, the Oldham claim was wider of the mark than his petrol prediction.
The hunt was on to find alternative energy sources, such as nuclear power. Even then, I felt punters would be uneasy about taking the wheel of a Datsun Atomic.
If it backfired, Bordesley Green was gone. And, let’s be honest, a plutonium leak is a lot more problematic than an oil spill.
Even the hardiest motorist would think twice about opening the bonnet to discover why there’s a strange knocking sound coming from the enriched uranium oxide rods.
Yet many, like my uncle, have grasped the nettle and searched for petrol substitutes. I recently interviewed someone who filled his car with recycled fat from chip shop fryers. I think it was a Larda. Or a cabab.
There’s also a bus service fuelled by human waste. I think it’s the number two.
“We even considered Flintstoneing our vehicle,” I explained to drinking companion Colin.
“Are those environmentally friendly tyres?” he asked.
‘‘No. We’re going to cut the bottom out of our Astra and use our feet.’’
Rather than pondering the whys and wherefores, perhaps I should simply rejoice the fact that we are free from the chains of sky-high petrol pump prices and fuel shortages.
I remember the dark days. If you sneezed while filling up it was £20 down the swanny.
I remember a long night queuing for pumps to become vacant, a night stuck behind a rusting Fiesta sporting a “powered by fairy dust” sticker.