Growing up as I did in the Highlands, I thought the world ended in Inverness.

Anything north of the Moray Firth was, to my childish mind, a wild, barren steppe where men married their sisters and women ate their young.

Imagine my later surprise then, while perusing an atlas, that I found there were perfectly functional cities north of the Highland capital, and many of them were in Norway.

In May I visited Stavanger and enjoyed a few days in that lovely little city. It was spotless, public transport ran smoothly, and although the place was excruciatingly expensive, everyone seemed happy.

I have no doubt that this was down to the fact that North Sea oil brings so much revenue to the country, it can afford to be just how it wants.

Norway is not a member of the European Union because it knew from the start that it was so wealthy that Brussels would dip its pocket for very little in return.

Norway has created a wealth fund from the money it makes out of oil which is now worth nearly $20 billion. The fund is designed to protect the country from the vagaries of global economics and ensure every citizen benefits now and in the future. I like Norway a lot and I’d like to go back, so I’d better start saving!

I like Kuwait less than Norway, because it brings back memories of unhappy times just before the invasion of Iraq, when I was a minuscule part of the military machine which removed Saddam Hussein from power.

But like Norway, Kuwait is fabulously wealthy because of the happy coincidence that it exists atop huge oil wells. So why isn’t Scotland, which like Norway and Kuwait has vast oil fields, in the club?

Moreover, why is Scotland giving away its energy to England on the so-called super highway, just announced by Westminster, when we have too many people living in fuel poverty because the cost of energy, which we produce remember, is so high? I find that baffling.

Added to this travesty is another Westminster whammy whereby pensioners will lose their winter fuel allowance, even though they are elderly and live in the frozen north of the country.

Things come in threes, they say, so you had better brace yourself for another energy evisceration in a country which is awash with the stuff, gives it away and gets little in return.

Scotland should be like Norway and Kuwait. Instead it is an energy husk, a fuel tank with a perpetual leak. And if you switched from the SNP to Labour at the last election because of the campervan and the iPad rather than the politics and the economics, then the travesty is that Scotland voted for it.