Editorial: Budget night used to be so simple

The weather's fine for the weekend - so what better to do than go for a drive and check out the price of petrol?

This is, of course, a fruitless exercise, because by the time you've found the cheapest in town you've burned off all the potential savings.

And when you fill up, you get back home only to find the pumps down the road have dropped the price below what you bought it for during your tour of the city and environs.

A tank of 55 or 60 litres, at 204.9c a litre, or 198.9c a litre ... What the heck?

Budget night this week - well, it used to be a "night" - brought back memories of the days when we all knew what the price of petrol was, when cars queued at stations on Budget night in anticipation of another rise, sometimes when the stations were actually closed.

It only seemed to be any different when you went to the beach, or were otherwise out beyond, and you needed gas to get back to civilisation, from a store or garage that had had to pay extra to get it there.

The nostalgic juices flow when you think that even when it was expensive, as it was in these circumstances, your Caltex Boron, methylbenzene, or whatever it was, still filled the tank for a mere $5 (sorry, two pounds and 10 shillings).

The good part was that you knew what the price would be by listening through the static on the wireless, which families did.

You didn't have to do Intrepid Journey to find out.

A smart kid could also work out from Budget night roughly how much the old man would be spending on smokes and beer for the next 12 months.

For the record, a gallon of gas may have been roughly the same price as a packet of 20 Greys, and in turn the same price as a jug of the ale.

No. It wasn't boring, it was deadly exciting stuff.

It used to be so simple.