I am in pain.<\/p>\n
Not the deep, dark, tortured pain that we<\/span> all literary geniuses suffer.<\/p>\n This is a more intense, physical<\/em> kind of pain.<\/p>\n I shut my hand in the car door.<\/p>\n No, I don’t know how I managed to do it.<\/p>\n Yes, it did hurt at the time.<\/p>\n No, the pain hasn’t got better.<\/p>\n Yes, the swelling is interesting, isn’t it?<\/p>\n As a result I probably won’t be riding for at least a day, maybe two, because, let’s face it, three of the four fingers on my right hand are pretty useless at the moment.<\/p>\n Which is a shame, because Tom and I are competing in Berkshire on Sunday; missing schooling time right now is a fairly critical failure.<\/p>\n Anyway, back to Fuel for Thought.<\/p>\n When, in 1887, Rudolf Diesel invented what we now know as the diesel engine, he intended the device to be powered, not by fossil fuel oil, but by vegetable oil.<\/p>\n The British motoring television programme, Fifth Gear, have just driven an unmodified, diesel-engined, saloon car from the East Coast of Lancashire to the West Coast of Yorkshire.<\/p>\n The car was powered by *surplus* (i.e. used) vegetable oil.<\/p>\n From the chippy.<\/p>\n The attractions of using a fuel that costs 37p\/litre in its brand new state (i.e. not from the chippy, which is probably free!) as opposed to a fuel that costs \u00a31.20p\/litre, are obvious.<\/p>\n The first 2,500 litres-use of Straight Vegetable Oil (SVO) are duty free, thereafter one is required to pay duty on each litre of SVO used.<\/p>\n But 2,500 litres would transport me approximately 25,975 miles (based on an average of my last 10 MPL calculations), and that’s a fair old slice of motoring!<\/p>\n Or, to put it another way, my fuel costs for those 25,975 miles would legally drop from \u00a33,117 to \u00a31,039.<\/p>\n Just saying.<\/p>\n My hand still hurts.<\/p>\n And here’s some more fuel for thought.<\/p>\n The US file\/music sharer Limewire is being sued for US $1 billion. BP are being told, by the US administration, that they’ll have to pay US $ 69 million.<\/p>\n It’s interesting to note that devastating oil spills are viewed so much lower down the scale than sharing a few mp3s.<\/p>\n