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We learned today that each tank at the doomed Buncefield oil depot housed 700,000 gallons of fuel, “enough to take a bus to the Moon and back 12 times”.
This is good news for fans of the Routemaster bus. Not entirely consigned to oblivion, it will retain its place as the National Physical Laboratory’s standard unit of improbable fuel consumption. In America, the equivalent unit is the Arnie (1 Arnie is the distance an SUV can drive on 1 US gallon. It is roughly equivalent to the European centimetre).
All this begs a question. Do we keep a Routemaster bus at the National Physical Laboratory, maintained at constant temperature and pressure? If not, how can we be sure? The French are a little more precise in their units of measurement, keeping a block of gold, or plutonium, or possibly kryptonite at perfectly constant temperature, pressure, humidity and joie de vivre in a secret laboratory beneath the Seine. But that may be because they are such fanatical cooks; when you work with ingredients like garlic, even a tiny discrepancy can mean the difference between haute cuisine and halitosis.
The other primary standard is, of course, the nation of Wales. All foreign territories are measured with reference to Wales (as in ‘the county covers an area roughly the size of Wales’), although it might prove challenging to store Wales at the NPL, not least because of the difficulty inherent in maintaining constant temperature and pressure in a country so prone to downpours. Not to mention the incessant singing, which might prove a distraction to the scientists.
And how would we drive the bus to the moon? Have our scientists secretly calculated that such a road would require enough tarmac to cover Wales to a depth of six inches? How did they find out? Is this all just an Anne Robinson plot to silence the singing? We should be told.
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