WHEN IT COMES to nostalgia, most folk my age reminisce over days of rolling condoms over the exhaust pipes of teachers' cars, sandlot baseball games before Little League ruined it, and the Thanksgiving dinner when Uncle Frank went face first into the pumpkin pie. My daydream is of a four-way junction in Kannapolis, North Carolina.

Kannapolis, in those days 45 or so years ago, was a pretty much in the middle of nowhere sort of textile mill company town, with a reasonably decent newspaper and not a lot else. You didn't go to Kannapolis for grand opera, or grand shopping or grand anything, except possibly a good deal on towels for the kitchen, bathroom or the family cat.

And, of course, that intersection. On each of its quad corners was a service station. Together they formed the battlefield for what may well have been the granddaddy of all gasoline price wars in America - a four-way conflict where the lone weapon was a grim determination to fill your tank more cheaply than the other three.

I stumbled into the line of fire one weekend while driving my 200-buck banger of a Chevrolet from Greensboro to Charlotte. Midway through Kannapolis, I was nearly blinded by red letters and numerals on signs drilling home the message that I could buy gas for 20.9 to 22.9 cents a gallon, depending on whether I looked north, south, east or west.

How these four stations stayed in business has remained a mystery to me to this day, but stay they did - for months on end. And when the price changed, it was never up, but always down. Rifle the kid's piggy bank, check under the sofa cushions for loose coins, add the change from a buck, recite "fill 'er up" - and presto! A motorist's fuelish dream come true.

My nostalgic daydream is quite specific. Not the date, nor even the year (maybe 1957 or '58), just the number "8.9." That was 8.9 cents, the price one of the stations was charging for a gallon of gas that particular day. I seem to recall forking over three one-dollar bills and getting a quarter and a couple of dimes back, or enough for three Pepsis and a bag of potato chips.

Bloody hell, that was even better than the days when I'd drive my A-model down to the Pure Oil station at the corner of Broadway and Jacksboro Pike in Knoxville, and Bryant Metler, John Newton, Twerp Kerr and I would pool our resources - about 43 cents in all - and buy enough gas to keep us on the road for the next week or so.

That was nearly a half-century ago, there's been much progress since then, and of course progress comes at a price. If the word reaching these shores is accurate, when it comes to motoring, whether for business or pleasure, the price at some American gas stops has reached more than $2 a gallon.

That, I gather, is an increase of 33 percent or more over the past year, but be warned, America - it could be worse. Far worse.

A few days ago, I wheeled my Ford Mondeo (in America, read Taurus) into the forecourt at the Nell Bridge petrol (British for "gasoline") station a few miles from Banbury, England, to fill up at the unleaded pump. By the time I had shakily put my wallet away and driven off, I was the equivalent of $67.95 poorer.

That figures out to about $4.50 a gallon. On a per-mile basis, it's cheaper to fly Concorde (or, for the faint of heart, a Boeing 747) than to drive down to the local pizzeria in Britain these days. While you don't exactly have to remortgage the house, it's a good idea to buy your bank manager a box of cigars or chocolates or a night on the town now and again.

It's not that the cost of gasoline itself is all that much greater in Britain than in the States. It's just that - and herewith the basis for my aforementioned warning to Americans - successive governments in Britain have discovered that motor fuel is, in fact, a monumental tax cow, just there for the milking.

A chap named Garry Russell has done the sums and figured out that for every 75 bucks of gas that goes into my Mondeo's tank, $55.50 of it goes into government coffers to fund four-star hotel accommodation for refugees caught sneaking into the country, sex-change operations for visiting Norwegians and speed cameras to nab motorists racing to the next fuel station to top up both their tanks and the government's tax pot.

A tank of gas for my Mondeo costs the equivalent of about $75 in Britain. Filling up at a station in Chicago would set me back about $26.10. The difference is the tax - and if one government can get away with it, you can bet your sweet bippy that others will follow suit.

You might argue that the solution is to force the government to cut the fuel tax. In which case you also believe it is possible to stuff the toothpaste back into the tube, that they'll soon call it the Upright Tower of Pisa and that Liz Taylor's last facelift actually worked.

The aforementioned Garry Russell is a prime example of the futility of it all. He is founder of Britain's Dump the Pump campaign, during which motorists across the land will boycott service stations every Monday for the foreseeable future until gasoline prices start falling. As a practical measure, that's right up there with doing a wee-wee into the wind.

Gas will start costing less, I suspect, on the day that Santa Claus, the Easter Bunny and the Tooth Fairy come tripping hand in paw down England's M4 motorway. Meanwhile, reckon it will occur to the average motorist to make do by filling up on either Sunday or Tuesday.

The simple fact is that in Britain - and, increasingly, in France, Sweden and other fleshpots across the Channel - the folk in government precincts and palaces have us motorists firmly by some quite sensitive bits of our anatomy.

What we really need is a global gas price war. So what say? Let's all meet tonight at 8:30 at that intersection in Kannapolis, man the pumps and get fighting.

Thought for the Week: Nostalgia isn't what it used to be.

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