Saturday, February 05, 2011

Sign Of The Times?

Remember when we were young and shone like the sun? No me neither, although perhaps if you grew up near Sellafield (or Windscale as it was known before it was rechristened) you had more in common with Syd Barrett than I did.

Anyway, back then we stood shocked and stunned when petrol went up to £1 a gallon, then some crafty bugger came long and switched the pumps to litres and charged us 40p a litre so we didn't notice that petrol was now £2.00 a gallon. Well today I handed over £100 for the privilege of filling up my car with diesel. It actually cost £90.60 but I didn't have anything smaller than a £20 note on me.

"Sign of the times," I said to the female cashier.
"Depressing isn't it," she replied whilst printing off a VAT receipt.

For my £90 I got 65.78 litres and I reckon I'll get 925 miles out of that - so it's roughly 10 miles for each pound spent. Southampton by train works out at £4.20 for the same distance and, even allowing for the generous day ticket, the buses cost £1.25 per 10 miles.

What it did show was how quickly the price goes up, when I filled up three weeks ago it cost me £86, that's the sort of inflation rate Argentina in the 1970's would have blanched at, although obviously it would be considered feeble by anybody living in Zimbabwe, or 1930's Germany.

1 comment:

Span Ows said...

Yeah, I put in 80 quid a few times over Christmas and the new year although I did hire a bigger ($WD) car than normal because of the weather!

In Venezuela there was nearly some trouble too when the petrol price crept up, it's almost 1.5p a litre now!