Loneliness of the long-distance fuel hunter as we go back to the future on £10 a gallon

Well, what a telling photograph this has turned out to be … a multi-layered commentary on the state of our beleaguered nation.

This picture was taken last year, just after we arrived back in the UK from five years abroad. We drove in to a fuel crisis caused by HGV drivers and the like blocking delivery terminals.

It was also due a 10.65% increase in the price of oil from $71.29 to $78.88 throughout September, said the RAC. 

Unleaded increased by 1.5p to 136.83p while diesel rose by 2.5p to 139.25p, making the price of petrol 22p a litre more expensive than a year ago (114.61p 30 September 2020) and diesel 21p dearer (118.10p).

And today I paid a few pence under a TENNER for a gallon of premium diesel – you know, that types that cleans your jets for you! YES! A TENNER!

We are back, just over six months down the line, we are back in a fuel crisis again.

This time caused by climate protests blocking major fuel depots, increased demand post-Covid lockdowns and Russia’s invasion of Ukraine…

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My first thought, when the picture of this man standing in libe arrived on my desk, was ‘what a joke’ … a bloke who’s ‘forgotten’ his car but is still queuing for his few litres of diesel. What a fuel, I thought in my tabloid mind.

But I looked again and I saw a man lost on the dystopian highway we are all now negotiating. An ordinary man standing in line because that’s what those who drive this country today have told him to do.

He appears to have no defiance, no anger, no embarrassment. Just a need which, to fulfil, he allows himself to be subjugated.

And in a queue in Middle England he will almost certainly be allowing himself to be ridiculed, insulted, scoffed and sneered at.

And all because he is standing in line where the sneerers are sitting in their hot metal boxes with steamy windows and tiny jukebox radios slipping around the back seat.

Not one of them stands out in the crowd…

But he does.

He stands out in the crowd, just like people did in Eastern Europe’s bread queues did, how the mum who queued for food in the snow in the second world war did, how the Muslim man stood alone for a Covid vaccine in Bolton.

This man isn’t a fool, far from it. He is a symbol of how our freedom as been eroded in the past few years … a second Brexit vote to protect Britain’s democracy that ultimately blew us all in to the facelessness of mass control and the virus which wiped out freedom even behind the blue-painted doors of our homes.

I for one will be happy to stand in line with people like this man who, perhaps without knowing it, are making a silent protest against this world that has been dropped upon us all like a dark, dense terrifying cloud.

The world is coming to a full stop, like somebody has flicked the switch and red lights have shut down our motorways and major roads. To go back to our home in Europe will now cost us about £7-800 one way…

But that’s still easier than trying to do it in an electric car!

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