Things are changing rapidly. Last night I was watching an episode of “Traffic Cops” filmed in 2009. They drove past a petrol station where the fuel was £1.09 a litre. Two years later and it’s now £1.40 a litre.
Take an average car with a 70 litre tank. In 2009 it would have cost you £76.30 to fill it up. Now … £98. If you’re doing a few miles to get to work then, believe me, it hurts. A full tank will last me a week, so – using those figures – I’m paying £21.70 more per week, or maybe £86.80 extra per month to get to work (assuming a 4 week month).
It’s not just petrol / diesel that’s gone up. Electric, gas and food has too. You can see the pain on peoples’ faces when they pay for food at Asda. It’s not funny any more, and no-one is getting a pay rise either.
People have now accepted that prices aren’t going to come back down. Petrol and Diesel will never be £1 a litre again, let alone £1.09 like it was 2 years ago. People are looking to save at the least, or for alternatives.
Are electric cars the future ? Personally I don’t think so just yet. For years our local milkmen have been driving around in milk floats. They were way ahead of their time. Battery-powered milk floats were slow, but they were quiet .. and they didn’t have a big exhaust chucking out fumes.
The reason, of course, that your local milkman had a milk float was because it was quiet. He could happily drive up your street at 5AM without waking anyone. So why then, are those milkmen now using Diesel-powered vans ? My brain can’t comprehend, so I can only conclude that electric vehicles are crap, and they rely on electric produced mainly by coal-fired power stations. Oh yes, and electric has just shot up by another 18%..
What other options do we have ? Energy from the sun perhaps ? Well yes, solar panels are appearing on the top of houses and now, strangely, it’s not just the local “eco-freak” who’s doing it – four houses in my immediate local area have panels, and there’s Government subsidies if you want them.
Whatever happens, the oil, gas and electric companies will continue to make insane profits and they’ll continue to tell us that it’s because they need to “reinvest into greener energy”.
I’ll stop moaning now. It’s been a week of continued price rises for everything I need, and I can’t even turn to drink to blot it all out, because down the one remaining local pub (all the others have closed) prices have just shot up. £3.30 for a pint of lager in a local pub ? Are you nuts ? It’s no wonder that pubs are closing and the UK is storing up bigger problems with bargain-basement prices on beer in supermarkets and cheap junk-food.
What is cheap ? Phone calls, it seems, and the internet. Getting online is cheaper now than it ever has been, and flat-screen TV’s are tumbling in price. The future, in my head, is filled with very fat people eating cheap pizza and oven chips, watching daytime TV, buying beer online and calling the local council to check that their dole money has gone in whilst people from across Europe come to the UK to do the jobs we should be doing, but three times better.
Gah.. I can depress myself at times…