For a country which is surrounded by oil, gas, wind and waves, it never fails to pain me how expensive our energy is.

Down the years I have visited Kuwait many times and I am sickened by the disparities between that country, which has a not dissimilar population to Scotland, and our own.

Although I have yet to visit Norway, I fear the same comparison. We should be as oil-rich as those two countries, with virtually free energy, and not do as we do today, staggeringly, by importing expensive oil and gas from elsewhere – nominally Kuwait and Norway. And this is not a treatise on the pros and cons of Scottish independence. That shibboleth is for another day.

Being thrawn, and not one to follow trends, I was fashionably late by a couple of days beyond the deadline before I submitted the meter readings to the Schloss Edwards energy provider.

It seems I was not alone, because it still took some time to enter the digits, worryingly akin to an international phone number, and then wait for the spinning egg timer of doom to stop on the overloaded website so they could be successfully saved.

Despite our vast natural energy resources, the UK still has to import expensive oil and gas from overseas

Despite our vast natural energy resources, the UK still has to import expensive oil and gas from overseas

The June 30 date was significant because it was the red letter day when the energy price cap was reduced. You’ll note, as I do through bitter eyes, that the lower cap bares scant similarity to the cost of wholesale oil and gas, which has plummeted over the past 12 months. That’s right. We’re getting done.

This week we have seen the self-inflicted travails of Thames Water, the biggest water company in the UK, which will probably have to be bailed out by the public purse – that’s you and me again – because of £14 billion in debt it recklessly racked up when interest rates were low.

Many of those billions were of course paid to directors and shareholders, instead of being invested in infrastructure which would have improved efficiency and not seen standards drop – instead meaning raw sewage was pumped into rivers. Brexit has helped of course, with no pesky EU quality standards to be met.

Privatising utilities was a brainchild of Margaret Thatcher during the 1980s. She even rubber-stamped billions in public subsidies, our money again, to help these companies on their way.

It represented a ‘get rich quick and grow richer while others suffer’ mentality, and while those with their snouts in the trough are coining it, people are struggling to choose between heating and eating.

And in today’s Scotland, with all that energy on our doorstep, that is sickening.