In 1969:
• The ‘summer of love’
• The threat of famine looms in Biafra
• Friends of the Earth, environmental pressure group, starts in America
• I was mastering the controls of the 49cc
go-kart, built for my seventh birthday by
my Father
Petrol was cheap when I was a child, the oil crisis had not happened and no environmental concerns allowed fuel tax to push up prices. A gallon then cost the same as a litre today. To capture brand loyalty companies introduced the type of ephemera that filled me with childish joy, tanks with petrol and tills with money. I have a nagging recollection of earlier petrol promotions than World Cup coins, Smurfs or tumblers.

Does the memory play tricks or were topless women once employed as pump attendants? A false memory, of a bare breasted news item, is undeniably possible. I was barely off the breast myself at the height of the permissive society. More
accurately, perhaps I was barely off the bottle, as back then:
• Baby powdered milk was favoured
• Cows’ milk was considered so good for you that we had it free in our school
• Lead-laden petrol was excellent enough to
warrant four stars
In 1973:
• I bought my first pop single (Slade)
• Sheik Yamani lead Arab states, imposing an oil embargo as a protest at US support for Israel in Yom Kippur war
• Lucy Harris and Ceridwen Slough reach their first birthdays
• An orange VW Beetle BTF384L rolled off the production line
I came slowly to realise that my Father’s analogy between the fuelling of cars and people was mostly incomplete. There is a deeper psychological, sociological and ritualistic side to human fuelling. At church they asked me to drink the blood of Christ. At home (because I wouldn’t eat) Mother would say: “Eat up, children overseas are starving!” And a whining little voice in my head replied: “You’d need to be starving to eat brussel sprouts”. A generation who’d been told: “You’ve never had it so good” were beginning to see that, as a consequence, other people were less well off.
In cafes with friends I wasted my pocket money on black coffee, a commodity second only to oil as the most traded in the world. Mahatma Gandhi said: “There is enough in the world for all men’s needs but not for one man’s greed.” We discussed the ethics of over consumption by the developed world minorities whilst we smoked our tobacco (another nutritionless cash crop).

In 1976:
• The Damned release New Rose and kick start Punk Rock
• American oil magnet John Paul Getty dies as North Sea oil begins to flow
• I am a year away from riding my little yellow moped on the road
• In Jordan Shareen Najar is born

Derelict fuel pumps stand in the most unexpected places. Some hidden away on country lanes, others like monoliths in open landscapes and some on (the wrong side of) still busy streets.
Redundant human fuellers, too, pepper our route.
Time renders the nurturing mother obsolete, yet she still may obsess over our nutritional well being.
The urge to feed is not the sole preserve of matriarchs and reasons for eating far outweigh a simple need for a full fuel tank. The fuel, its delivery and deliverer all carry great importance to the fuelled. Often we consume the unnecessary or inappropriate:
• The milk of human kindness
• Titbits
• Forbidden fruits
• Social drinking
• Comfort eating
The end of the nineteen seventies bought a sharper political focus to me and the opposite, though no less sharp, to my parents. Street riots and civil disobedience had replaced the laissé faire inactivity of Hippy culture. My journey was now at a marching stage. CND and Greenpeace said we needed more than fuel for survival - you had to ‘Protest and survive’. Upon leaving school I claimed Social Security until my brief spell ‘in oil’
- three days at a local refinery. My first lover was now fuelling me. She gifted me my first reasonable guitar nd camera. I started writing songs and taking pictures.
In 1984:
• George Orwell proved wrong?
• Bob Geldoff pleads with us to ‘Feed The World’
• I join Shane and Daryl Allingham and John Walker to form a post punk social conscience musical anarcho syndicate... Trivial Matters
• The Thatcher government decide to curtail certain peoples’ freedom to travel within Britain
• The miners strike indirectly curtails my travelling home from Wales. I am forced by police to wait for coal carrying convoy on the motorway to pass
Ivy clings to the, clock like, face of a petrol pump.
Like a human face it tells time not by pointing to numbers but by showing maturation. With the loan of my Dad’s tripod I capture its image before it is gone and I move on down the road.
A detour takes me to art school where I am destined to meet Lucy Gale and Joanne Berry. Whilst at college I was happy that good friends such as Shane Allingham kept me supplied with beer and cigarettes. Once whilst ordering (and probably paying for) a take away meal, Shane decided he needed double the fuel I did. “Because you’re a sports car and I’m an articulated lorry,” he explained. He went on to drive articulated
lorries for a living.

In 1990:
• Iraq invade Kuwait initiating a latter day crusade to protect oil interests. For every one U.N. death Iraqi forces loose one thousand in the
ensuing conflict
• I teach my first class of students among them, Lucy Harris
• Joanne Berry (a workmate in college) becomes my latest ‘driver’
It’s the closing decade of the millennium (for those using the Gregorian calender). In this decade I have come to realise just how much time I have been travelling. I was often carless, hitching lifts and relying on public transport or partners like Joanne. Strange to consider that my Mum was always ‘chauffeured’ by my Dad. In the same year that, Ken Saro-Wiwa was executed by authorities in Nigeria, (for speaking of the ill treatment of Ogonis by an oil company), I adopted Brian. Probably over a bowl of Lucy Gale’s fabulous carrot soup I was cajoled.
We struck a deal.;The orange Beetle BTF 384L,
which she’d had since college and loved dearly, would soon be mine. I named it Brian after Lucy’s
conservative father.
In the corporate controlled nineteen nineties, as never before, it seems money counts for everything. Market forces drive technological advance and turn the once essential commodity obsolete overnight. The computer and software I am using now, are already superseded by newer versions. Digital Imaging threatens to assign ‘chemical’ photography to the ranks of the ‘retro’ along with my analogue vinyl recordings. In the year two thousand there will be no more leaded petrol for Brian.
Sheik Yamani and Saddam Hussein reminded us that the well oiled machinery of western culture most oiled machines runs on oil welled elsewhere. Bill Gates, Bill Clinton et al send the message co-operate with the corporate or be damned.
It is a changing world.

In September 1997:
• My fuel pipes (intestines) were a year away from being photographed internally (endoscopy)
• ‘Road rage’ and congestion did not stop Andy Green reaching 763 mph in a car
• Shareen Najar leaves Jordan to study
at my place of work
• Ivor Green reaches the end of his 60 year journey through life

At my Father’s funeral the church was bedecked with harvest festival foods. I momentarily thought of the novelist Kurt Vonegut’s advice to agnostics. I address my prayers: “To whom it may concern.”

Thank you for coming with me on a selective tour down my memory lanes. I hope you enjoy seeing the images as much as I have enjoyed creating them.

Tim Green 1999.