17 December 2015
The True Price Of Diesel
By Chin Chin
No one can say that it isn’t exciting. As the wholesale price of oil slides down towards $35 per barrel it would be a hard man who could pull in at a motorway service station without a slight flutter of expectation. To what level will the price of diesel have fallen? On the continent it has been well below £1 per litre for some time but there, after all, the drop has been reinforced by the collapsing euro. What will I get this time? £1.10 a litre or the enticing 99p which some supermarkets are said to be offering?
It is all too thrilling, especially when you remember it the other way round. The inexorable rise of fuel prices used to make a visit to the pumps a terrifying experience but now, with prices falling, it feels as if fuel is almost free and that there is nothing to stop you, a modern Helios, driving your vehicle across the firmament. All right, yes, I appreciate that it is only a Ford and not the sun itself, but you get the point. As I draw off the motorway everything seems possible.
It is always said that to travel hopefully is better than to arrive, and when the arrival is at a service station on the M1 you realise that there is more to that saying than you would think. Full of glorious anticipation I pulled into one of them last week and, engine purring, eased my way up to a vacant pump. Looking up I saw that it was Pump No 1 and I have to say that that gave me a thrill. It was the very pump which James Bond would have chosen. It was when I had got out of the car and opened the filler cap that I began to wish I had chosen a less prestigious number. Pump No 1 was making a loud whirring sound and no amount of shaking, kicking or pressing buttons would restore the counter from the amount purchased by the previous customer to zero. Either I had to begin with £37 on the clock or I would need to go and persuade the cashier, lurking somewhere in the complex the far side of the rainswept forecourt, to zero it.
No, there was another possibility. I could back the car up to the pump behind, which by any reasonable mathematics must be Pump No 2, and use that one instead. I reversed carefully, saw that the new pump had zeroed and put the nozzle into the filler in the side of the car. So far so good but then I pulled on the trigger which should have started the flow of diesel.
In the case of an unbroken thoroughbred stallion, nervousness is often a sign of quality. It shows that it has spirit and fire, that is not willing to be messed about with. True, it makes handling it difficult but you have the consolation that once it has been broken in these things will mature into character. What a fine horse you will have. With petrol pumps is a little different because if the pump betrays nervousness there is no prospect of a compensating reward later on. My petrol pump was nervous in the extreme. Pull the trigger very slightly and an infinitesimal amount of diesel would drip down into the tank. Pull it any harder and the flow would cut out.
There is a limit to the number of times you can move your car from pump to pump around a busy forecourt without becoming conspicuous, so I decided that rather than move again I just had to manage the problem. My first idea was not to push the nozzle in fully. The automatic cutout was in some way reacting with the back of the pipe, I reasoned. Put it in half way and all would be well. The trouble with that system is that if you lose concentration you find that not all the diesel is going into the car. There you are, standing next to the car and trying to work out whether the hair of the man three pumps away is really his own, when you become aware of an unpleasant dampness down your leg, rather as if a large dog had mistaken it for a tree. The difference is that this time the smell is of diesel and as it ran down my leg and into my shoe it occurred to me that it isn’t the easiest smell to get rid of.
That not having proved an outstanding success, it was time for Plan B. That involved jamming the nozzle right in and jerking it around. Fortunately that didn’t actually break the pipe but it produced a staccato effect with the supply continually cutting out and having to be eased back on so that filling up took time, a point not missed by the bad tempered man waiting behind me.
Anyway, after it was finished, I went into the office to pay, hoping that no one would notice the diesel smell, and that if they didn’t they would put the wet patch down to the rain.
“Pump No 12?” asked the young woman on the cash desk.
“I think it was Pump No 2,” I replied. “Anyway the one over on the right.”
“No, it’s No 12” she said, using her credit card machine to take the payment for the diesel and a large sticky bun which I had selected. I thanked her and began to leave the shop. It was at that point that she called me back. The man who had actually filled his vehicle from Pump No 12 wanted to make a payment. I had been at Pump No 9.
The trouble was that the amounts we were due to pay were broadly similar. Generously I offered to waive the difference, overlooking the fact that my bill was actually slightly higher than his. Then I suggested that I should pay him £3 in cash to square things up. That wouldn’t do either because he used his receipts to claim from his employer and didn’t want to claim too much.
No, it all had to be reversed, but that involved a quarter of an hour while managers discussed how to separate the sticky bun, which was to stay on my bill from the diesel (no, I mean the costs of course, the actual bun and the diesel were still entirely separate). Gradually the queue got longer and I was sorry to see that the man who had waited for me to fill the car was now behind me once again and muttering to himself psychopathically. A member of staff was checking through the containers for sale to try and work out which one the diesel smell was coming from. I decided to try not to walk past either of them on the way out.
By the time I left the filling station, the atmosphere had become quite cool. So had the weather. It was still raining outside and Pump No 1 was still locked, the total of £37 apparently stuck there in eternity. I felt less like Helios now. “I’ll bet he didn’t have to fill the sun up with diesel” I reflected morosely. Still, I should have been less ungrateful. Helios was manoeuvred into letting his son Phaeton take the reins for a day and the chaos that followed from that made my troubles at the service station look quite modest.
