Early one morning, just as the sun was rising…

CHRIS BENNETT finds himself recounting happy memories in the petrol hunt.

SERENDIPITY was lurking around my comings and goings last week, and provided a lighter side to the petrol excercise. On Monday a friend told me that there was unleaded petrol at Coastals.

Now this little establishment is one of my favourites; a sort of farming oasis hidden from the hurly-burly of the main road. I used to buy bird seed there when I had a garden full of birds.

Early in the morning, which at this time of the year means seven o’clock, as the sun rises at a quarter to seven, I toddled off to Coastals.

I am not too sure how to describe Coastals, but it reminds me of the small town of Brits, in what is now the Northwest Province.

In those days, forty years ago, there was a very big business called Dreiers, selling timber, hardware, small tractors, high quality china tea pots – I once saw some Arabia ware there – along side machetes, garden tools, paint and lawn mowers and what I believe are called plumbers’ requisites.

Dreiers followed business practises that were positively Victorian. After finding the tea pot, harrow or combined harvester you needed there was a series of ladies who courteously stamped the piece of paper you had just been given before you joined the queue to pay.

Buying a small tin of paint was an exercise in patience; or time consumption, whichever you prefer. It felt as though what should have taken one and a half minutes had taken most of the morning.

Earlier in my life I had encountered the Farmers’ Co-op in what was then Salisbury. It had the same charming, slightly surreal air to it. Outside the huge building, in beautifully wrought green and gold signs, were the names of the services offered. One contained the legend Grainbags, Hessian and Twine. I concluded that they must be the legal advisors to the farming fraternity.

Coastals is hidden away on the road to the delightfully named Bushy Vales, a name dating back, I suspect, to long before the days of bananas and sugar cane, both of which have their own allure when you don’t have to farm them.

The petrol and diesel pumps, of which there are three, spaced to allow tractors and trailers or big trucks to fill up, are attended by a sleepy fellow with a clipboard; he records the amount sold.

I said I would like to by three hundred rands of petrol. The young man said that they sold petrol in litres, which left me a bit confused; I said it was early in the morning.

Still a bit confused I went into the barn-like store to use the mini ATM, something of which I had never heard before.

The idea is that you put in your card in the usual fashion but instead of money the machine will give you a slip of paper, which I would exchange at the till; or at least I would have exchanged it had the till any money in it. But it didn’t; it was early in the morning. I could feel the temperature rising.

At this point a guardian angel appeared in the form of a lady who needed some piece of equipment, which she found and paid for. There was now money in the till and I thought my day was saved. It was then explained to me that I did not need cash for the transaction, the slip would stay in the till. Or something. Clearly I am easily confused.

I got my petrol and the proceeded to be sweetness and light.

It is nice to have a little old-fashionedness from time to time.