FUEL-ISH BEHAVIOUR

I don’t like to get overtly ‘political’ on the old blog but, honestly what madness is it that overwhelms my fellow countrymen whenever there’s even the slightest sniff of a fuel shortage…? There’s a vague possibility that there might be a tanker driver’s strike in about a week or so and we all seem to get this overwhelming desire to drain the entire network of fuel stations of every single available drop of fuel when there’s not even a shortage yet, causing tempers to flare, huge queues to form and then actually creating massive shortages when they aren’t really necessary.

What, as they say, fresh madness is this, people o’Britland…?

Are we just overwhelmed with this ridiculously selfish notion that we are not prepared to live with merely an adequate amount of fuel in our tanks when there’s a chance that the other fellow might have more than us? Are we that insecure? Must we all really fill up our tanks to bursting just in case the strike starts before we’ve had another opportunity to top it up again as we use it all up over the course of the next week or so?

There is a rumour that this is all a political conspiracy designed to top up the Chancellor’s tax coffers before the end of the tax year and make sure that any strike action has a minimal impact because we’re all going around with the stuff sloshing around going “Yah! Boo! Sucks!” to those workers with a legitimate safety worry.

The one (was it really?) eleven years ago was bad enough. Remember? When we all thought £1.00 per litre was intolerable… It doesn’t seem so bad now, does it? Back then, the fuel-buying madness started expanding out in waves until we were nearly all joining in, and I suspect that it’s the memory of that that causes much of today’s chaos. I can clearly remember that I worked for a “no excuses” kind of a company back then and, living as I do, miles from any petrol stations, I suffered quite a lot of what we would probably call “range anxiety” in my old jalopy of the time. Thankfully, in those days, that particular car could run on four-star as well as unleaded, and so I managed to muddle through, but this time I won’t be quite so lucky and fully expect another bout of high anxiety as I stare at the quivering needle.

Wierdly, the musical “panic” sting from “A Night to Remember” always came into my mind at that time whenever I passed a queue of cars, which just goes to show that it really is the strangest things that you remember. If things get really bad this time around, I shall go to work, pick the computer up from my desk, drive home with it and work from there. After all, I did that for over three years and it’s really not the worst option.

Of course, eleven years ago things  then rapidly returned back to normal, and once regular delivery services had returned we all kind of forgot just how dependent the whole country is on the fuel supply and how easily everything can be brought to a skidding halt when something so vital gets cut off. The difficulty is always that the people most hurt by these protests are never those who the protesters want to punish, but those who are, for whatever reasons, totally dependent on their cars to get to work, or the holiday destinations dependent on tourists getting to them that can no longer be reached, or the thousand and one other things we do when we create a nation that is almost totally dependent upon road transport, build all of our major shopping centres out of town, cut back public transport to the bone and then switch off the petrol tap.

Obviously there’s no corresponding fool shortage to go along with it which, as we approach another “All Fools Day” is probably, at the very least, appropriate. Mind you, H.M.G. don’t really help when they know that the very best way to get everyone panicking is to tell us not to panic. “Why’s he telling us not to panic?” “There must be something they’re not telling us!”  “That makes me panic!”

This is then fuelled (sorry!) by the TV news teams going off and finding the one petrol station that actually has run out of petrol and broadcasting it so that just about everyone then goes out and empties all the rest thinking that there’s a crisis, after which, of course, there is one.

“Don’t panic! Don’t panic!” We should put that on the Union Flag or the nation’s Coat of Arms: “Non Agitare! Non Agitare!”

I imagine our neighbours across the Channel or our friends across the Atlantic must wonder what all the fuss is about. Well, maybe we would just get a French Gallic shrug, but I wonder what would happen in their, much more open countryside, if a similar dispute was to happen...? “Zut Alors!” Equally, I hate to think about what might occur in the U.S.A., but I suspect that there might actually be some bloodshed, so I can only hope that we deal with this “non-crisis” with a certain amount of dignity and respect for our fellow motorists.

What do you think are the chances of that?

Ah, well… We’ll see…

But then it’s not been the greatest of weeks for H.M.G., has it? What with the so-called “Granny Tax” and its consequent emergence of a definite schism between the young and the elderly in this country, because the young feel that the elderly are spending “their” tax money and there’ll be none left for them when they get old, presumably because none of them are doing any breeding, and the elderly feeling the injustice of having worked long and hard, paid for the generation before theirs’ retirement plans, and believing the “Daily Mail” when it claims that the young are just a bunch of work-shy, rioting layabouts.

Or “Pastygate” where an attempt to level the playing field between takeaway food outlets and the supermarkets only manages to make a lot of us resent paying a tax which we already were paying anyway… and equally coming to resent the superior attitude of those who don’t eat like the “common herd” hiking up the cost for those of us who do… As I said on FizzBok to little acclaim: “In one Greggs I once went in there was a sign: ‘Sausage Rolls 25p each OR 4 for a £1’ - Now THAT’S how to do economics...!” Ho, ho, bleeding ho…!

Or “Postgate” where the announcement of restrictions on Post Office price hikes is immediately followed by the biggest price hike in years, but H.M.G. can then claim that it’s not their doing… but the generation that still use the post most are, again, the one most likely to suffer. I don’t know how they really can get away with calling it “First Class” any more anyway. We all know that they love a bit of “rebranding” (remember “Consignia”…?) so perhaps they should just have one rate and just call it “The Post”.

When it comes to services like that, one flat rate might be a better option anyway. I remember once being in Boston, Massachusetts and being terribly impressed with their “one fare – anywhere” policy. That meant that if you went just one stop or thirty, the fare was the same. I “reckon” that if transport companies in all of our major cities tried doing that, at, say, a quid, in the end they’d actually make more money.

But what do I know…?

Luckily, we’ve got our heroic “Number One Test Team in the World” to distract us from all these woes…

Oh, wait a minute…