the throwaway camera and the price of fuel

Here is another picture from the throwaway camera. Maybe this shows why I should throw it away. That big blob in the right-hand side is my finger in front of the lens. D’uh!

You can see the price we pay for petrol here in Australia (well, maybe you can’t, it is quite a small picture):

“ULP” is unleaded petrol and sold on the day I took this picture for AUD 1.398 per litre. Now that is, in pound sterling, err, wait a minute …. gets out calculator … how many litres to the gallon?? … I see that 1 litre = 0.219 969 248 299 gallon … what next … so it is AUD 6.36 per UK gallon, AUD 0.47 to the pound, therefore pound sterling 2.98, say 3 pounds to the gallon. ULP!! Does that sound right? No idea. We will leave it there.

Afterthought – has the UK gone metric yet? The metric system was all the rage when I left there in 1968 but I have a suspicion that it (the UK) has not yet managed to change over. Typical. One reason I say this is that my elder brother, living in the south of England, asked recently if Australia had gone metric. I told him rather haughtily that Australia was metric in 1973 and even Zambia in the heart of Africa was metric in 1968.

While on the topic (of fuel, we are talking about now) I have a grievance, and so do a lot of other Australians if they knew about it – the price of our fuel at the pump is fixed to some no doubt esoteric, even ersatz, datum in Singapore. Singapore! Last thing I knew there was no fuel mined (or whatever you do with it) in Singapore. And 3/4 of all the fuel we need here in the land down under is locally grown, comes from oil wells in the Bass Strait, so what is this Singapore nonsense? No wonder you get grumpy when you get old.

That said, I am not too enthusiastic about the little camera and may just drop it in the bin. Costs me AUD 20 to get a film processed.