I’ve just refuelled my car. It cost £68.01!

Always the extra penny, of course, no matter how hard I try for a round pound. It reminds me of an old Not the Nine O’Clock News sketch – Rowan Atkinson, I think, painstakingly fills up his car and gets the pump to a nice round figure – £3.00 I think, and then, just as he puts the pump back into its holder, Mel Smith in the kiosk pushes a button and the display flips over to £3.00 . . . . and half a penny!

Anyway, I still can’t get used to these ridiculous prices – £1.28 a litre. Seeing the pounds go up faster than the litres on the pump display just seems wrong somehow!

When I was about 15, a friend and I planned a driving holiday for when we were old enough to drive (we planned on borrowing my parents’ car – little did they know!). Part of the planning was to work out the costs – accommodation, meals and, of course, petrol.

At the time, fuel prices were rising rapidly (how strange!) and had reached about 70p a gallon I think (if only – what on earth were people complaining about?). so, not knowing what was likely to happen in the next few years, we picked what we thought was a completely outlandish, ridiculous figure – an unimaginable worst case scenario . . . we allowed for the possibility that petrol might go up to as much as £1 a gallon -ONE WHOLE POUND! And I remember us remarking that really, we were being way too cautious because petrol would NEVER get that expensive.

Oh . . . . the naivity of youth!!