Obviously there will be those who do, but I suspect they are not directly involved with the business of moving about the country on a regular basis, and opinions are usually influenced by the circumstances of the time. That said, the constant upward spiralling of fuel costs are beginning to bite rather hard and a radical rethink is on the cards.

The £2 litre of fuel is not far away, and we all know it will not stop there.

Broon and Darling bleat about us having to tighten our belts etc. etc. – and at the same time dread yet another parliamentary row, this time over the intention of MPs to vote themselves a 10 grand rise in the near future, letting their own belts out a notch or so in the process.

With the rise in fuel prices reflecting a bigger tax grab off the motorist, the government has little incentive to put the brakes on rising prices, even though the knock-on effect in the cost of everything else is jacking up inflation at an alarming rate.

We are, in fact, the hapless witnesses to the petty meddlings of one of the most useless governments in living memory.

So what can the ordinary person do about it? I suppose the short answer is not very much, although there are a few dodges we can try. A recent drive to Fife had me frequently sitting in traffic waiting to negotiate some of the many road-engineering projects encountered on the way, and each time I stopped I tried switching off my engine. With the round trip totalling around 200 miles and around 40 minutes in all spent going precisely nowhere, the saving in diesel would have been small, but significant.

Given I was not alone in my enforced rest periods, a multiplier of a few hundred would not be unreasonable to use, with a decent calculator necessary to work out the same on a national basis each day.

According to many of the reports on Radio 2, bless 'em, many of the down-south jams have traffic at a standstill for hours on end, most of which are typified by news shots of vehicles just sitting with engines running all the time. So that's one way we could save money on fuel. I'm not going down the road leading to the practice of running diesel cars and vans on old chip oil etc. It is rather complex and also carries the responsibility to tell the tax mob who will then extract their cut – better then to be as efficient as possible.

You see, another aspect of my trip to Fife and back involved that constant pain in the ear – the impatient driver. You'll recognise him or her, nagging away behind, then screaming by at max revs, only to settle down to a speed more or less as before, but 20 yards in front.