Let’s start with three stories from the Boxing Day edition of the “Daily Mail”, the first recapping some news from 2012 that made them proud to be British…..a couple from Surrey spent their spare weekends getting rid of weeds, broken bottles, scrap metal and other rubbish that had been dumped on a overgrown grass verge outside their home. Their local council ordered them to either pay £78 for a retrospective licence for the work, or return the verge to its original state. In current news, there’s a report that traffic wardens in the Gwynned Council area of North Wales have been issued with tape measures in order to issue £70 parking tickets to drivers who park more than 19 inches from the kerb. And on another page, the paper reports that the EU, in its latest foray into mind-bogglingly tedious bureaucratic nit-picking, has decreed that plastic toy footballs – the brightly coloured ones that kids kick around at the park – now have to carry a health and safety warning as they are apparently a choking hazard for the under-threes. No one, however, can explain how a child might choke on a ball that is bigger than their own head!

Well, here’s a suggestion to the mindless officials in the Ministry of Interference in Brussels…. instead of legislating the size of the hole in a toilet seat, or decreeing that malt vinegar must be white not brown, or that pints shall no longer actually be pints (these are not made up – they all happened), why don’t you tackle LPG gas cylinders instead? It would be a fantastic advance towards world peace, harmony and equality, almost as good as giving women the vote or abolishing slavery, if you could just do something sensible and constructive about LPG standards, so that people in camper-vans travelling all over Europe and the UK can actually run out of gas and not then have to embark on a tour of the entire country they are in at the time to find (a) the right gas, (b) in the right size bottle, and (c) with the right size valve in order to actually use the gas from the bottle. That’s not asking too much, is it??

As you can possibly tell, filling our gas bottles has not been an easy task in this part of the world – it’s certainly not like New Zealand where you take your bottle to Rockgas or whoever and they fill it up on the spot. Or at very least, exchange a standard size/standard fitting empty bottle for a standard size/standard fitting full bottle. Not here!
:: In Finland, they only have Finnish bottles which are great because the valve fits a UK hose no problem, but no other country in Europe, including the UK, will exchange the Finnish bottle. And what’s more, Finland wins the award for the dearest gas in civilisation, at around €115 for the bottle and the gas.
:: In Germany, they exchange “European” bottles but won’t take UK ones, and you need an adapter to use their bottles and Dutch ones anyway.
:: In the UK, they exchange UK bottles but won’t take European ones. Nor will they exchange, even at Calor outlets which is possibly the leading gas brand in Britain and Ireland, an empty Irish Calor bottle for a full UK Calor bottle. A full new bottle without an exchange but including gas is £67 (€82)
:: In return, an empty UK Calor bottle is worthless at an Irish Calor dealer. But a full new Irish bottle can be purchased for €68.
:: In France, you can get a silver French bottle but not an orange Spanish one. Including the gas, it will set you back €39.
:: In Spain, they will fill your bottle (if you have a “filling adapter” that’s legal in Spain but nowhere else probably) or they will exchange bottles. That is, you can exchange orange Spanish gas bottles but you can’t exchange silver French ones, even although France may be as close as only a kilometre away. But if you do get an orange Spanish bottle you can use an “emptying adapter” that’s legal in the UK but not in Spain to fit the orange bottle to the hose in your van. The orange bottle including the gas is just over €30.
:: In Croatia, if it’s not completely impossible, it is very close to it, that you cannot fill, exchange, buy or sell a gas bottle anywhere.
:: Andorra is the best of the lot. Not only is their petrol and diesel the cheapest by far in Europe, but they readily exchange almost all gas bottles, and only charge about €20! (And the lady – I use the term loosely – carries the full bottle to the van for you!)

Confused? You should be! There are plenty more examples, but as you can see, when you think the gas is getting low, you’d better hope that you’re in the right place to do a simple swap of an empty or near-empty bottle for a nice new full one. If not, be ready for extra costs and extra time….it won’t be easy!

On the up side, if anyone is keen on collecting used empty LPG bottles, you’ll find a blue UK bottle and a Finnish bottle down the side of a Repsol service station in Pamplona in Spain, an orange Spanish bottle hidden behind a recycling bin at the side of the road in Provence, another blue UK bottle at the hardware shop in Rathcoole near Dublin, and a silver European bottle in the storage area of the campsite at Abbey Wood, London. They’re all yours…..

Enough gas about gas! But to return briefly to the way the Eurocrats spend their otherwise unproductive days in the office….what’s the bet the EU joins the fray in Gwynned over the parking rules and decrees that in fact tickets may not be issued when cars are parked more than 19 inches from the kerb, but must instead only be issued in cases where the offending distance is more than 48.26cm?? (There’s 2.54cm to the inch – you do the maths!)