Anyone who has visited North America will likely come back with the notion that they don’t know they’re born as far as petrol prices go. Last month I visited my family in Canada, managing to arrive 20 minutes before a huge hydro blackout rendered everything into darkness along the eastern seaboard from northern Canada all the way down to Florida. All commercial enterprises immediately closed their doors and naturally we all thought we had been nuked rather than falling victim to a series of hydro stations playing dominoes-all-fall-down.

Things wobbled back to normal over the next 10 days and petrol, sorry gas, prices hit the news. Gas stations had sold less, people were being told to conserve fuel, so of course, prices of this heavily government subsidised commodity had to go up.

It was very unclear who was putting prices up – the oil companies or those running the gas stations, but the public was urged to ring hotline numbers to report anyone ‘gouging’ the market. Gas, in some places, had gone up by, shock-horror, 10 cents to 80-odd cents (roughly 40p) a litre. People were tutting-tutting all over the place. Like I said, they don’t know they’re born.