Time was when you could pull up at a petrol station, wind your window down, hand money to a man in a brown petrol-attendant’s lab coat, and that was that.
You never got out of your seat. If there were such an establishment available now, I would drive out of my way to patronise it. But there isn’t. It’s called progress.
So I inserted my card and responded to the insolent beeps of the machine — another of the indignities to which progress subjects us — and, eventually, the little screen told me, without so much as a please or thank you, to go fill my car.
But the flap that conceals the petrol cap on my Skoda Yeti wouldn’t open.
It is of a strange design. There is no button or lever inside the car. All you do is to press with your thumb at a point about eight o’clock on the flap’s surface and the thing pops open.
But it didn’t. I pressed at 6, 7, 8 o’clock. I pressed at 9, 10, 11 o’clock. I hummed encouragingly along to Bill Haley. The flap remained shut, and I gave up.
But the pump was ready to feed fuel at my expense and, if I didn’t pump some, presumably the next customer would, so I went into the shop attached to the garage, where two lads were buying lollies.
They were maybe 11 years old.
I explained to the woman at the till that I couldn’t open the flap on my car, so I wouldn’t be buying fuel, and would she kindly cancel the transaction.
“We’ll open it, mister,” exclaimed the 11-year-olds in unison and within moments, the two had plunged like lemmings into my car and were scouring it for a hidden button or lever despite my insistence that no such thing existed.
After five minutes, they concluded that no such thing existed, and they shook their remarkable locks and headed out of my life, with limitless acres of time ahead of them and no consciousness that they’d just wasted five minutes.
I thought of telling them it’s the little things like this that clog the veins and eat the days, the countless, murderous little things. But they wouldn’t have listened.
I still had a third of a tank of fuel, so I drove my car to Jesus. Jesus is a mechanic from the days before progress.
He earned his name by bringing engines back from the dead. He went at my flap with a pair of high-technology screwdrivers and a serious expression. “Often,” he said, “it depends on holding your breath and pulling the right face. If that fails, brute force.”
That failed. But Jesus was reluctant to resort to brute force because the flap was a cheap plastic thing, he said, and therefore likely to cost several hundred dollars to replace. And besides, a French tourist with a dying Nissan had arrived in search of resurrection.
I drove the car home all unrefillable and went, God help me, to the internet, where I found a video of a man dismantling the back right corner of his Skoda Yeti to get at his jammed petrol flap. “Jesus,” I said, and at that very moment he rang.
“I’ve just thought,” said Jesus, “have you tried locking the car and then unlocking it again?”
I saw no reason that should work, but Jesus didn’t get to be Jesus by turning water to water. I went out to the garage, reached for the key, pressed lock, pressed unlock and well, “Thank you, Jesus,” I said.
It had taken an hour I won’t get back. “The waste remains,” wrote William Empson in his only readable poem, “the waste remains and kills.”
