Net Zero, Oil Spikes and the Curious Case of Energy Amnesia

It is curious how quickly geopolitics can make yesterday’s certainty look a bit flimsy.

Oil jumps 30 per cent in a matter of weeks because two men decide to rearrange the Middle East with explosives, and suddenly the idea of importing vast quantities of fuel from volatile regions looks less like robust economic planning and more like wishful thinking with a spreadsheet attached.

For years we have been told that Net Zero is an expensive affectation, a hobby for metropolitan liberals who enjoy windmills and lentils. The argument runs that we are crippling ourselves while the rest of the world burns whatever it fancies. Better, apparently, to double down on fossil fuels and abandon the green fantasy.

Yet here we are, watching Brent surge because the Strait of Hormuz might become a shooting gallery. Every spike is effectively a tax on the British economy. It feeds straight into petrol prices, inflation, household budgets and industrial costs. We do not get a discount for scepticism. We pay the world price like everyone else.

The awkward truth is that renewables are not primarily a moral crusade. They are an insurance policy. Once you have built a wind farm, nobody in Tehran can make it more expensive out of spite. Once you have electrified transport, at least in part, you are not checking the oil futures market before filling the car.

Of course, it is not simple. Wind needs storage, grids need upgrading, EVs need infrastructure. None of this is cheap, and none of it happens by chanting slogans. But compare that complexity with the alternative, which is continued exposure to global commodity markets that can lurch on a Sunday evening because someone pressed a red button.

One wonders whether those still promising to “ditch Net Zero” have factored this in. If your central claim is that fossil fuels equal security and prosperity, a 30 per cent oil spike caused by geopolitical tension is not terribly helpful. It rather suggests that dependence on traded hydrocarbons equals volatility and vulnerability.

Perhaps the new line will be that we should drill more at home. Fine, where commercially viable. But North Sea oil is sold at global prices too. It does not come with a patriotic discount at the pump in Yate or Newton Abbot. The market does not care about flags.

As for me, I shall continue quietly generating my own electricity with solar PV, warming water with solar thermal, and letting the ASHP hum away in the background. It does not make me virtuous and it certainly did not come free, but it does mean that when oil spikes because somebody somewhere fancies a bit of brinkmanship, my exposure is at least slightly less than it might have been.

GP Appointments - By Combat

I have invented a new game show. It is called “Appointment or Annihilation”.

The premise is simple. Instead of sitting in a phone queue at 8.00 am listening to Greensleeves and questioning your life choices, patients gather in a municipal sports hall and fight for the right to see a GP. Nothing lethal, obviously. We are not barbarians. Just a brisk, morally improving gladiatorial contest with foam javelins and those oversized cotton bud things from It’s a Knockout.

The receptionist, elevated on a small dais, surveys the melee with a clipboard. “Two appointments left. One face to face, one telephone. Commence.”

There would be heats. Asthmatics in one corner, bad knees in another. The truly committed would have to prove the urgency of their condition. If you can sprint the length of the hall to tackle a retired scaffolder from Yate, perhaps your chest infection can wait until Thursday.

Points awarded for visible inflammation. Bonus round for anyone who can produce a rash without Googling it first.

I appreciate some will say this is dystopian. But is it really so different from what we have now? The current system already requires speed, agility, and a working knowledge of redial. I once rang 47 times in three minutes. That is not primary care. That is competitive sport.

At least my format has transparency. No more mysterious “all appointments gone” at 8.03 am. You would know precisely why you lost. It was the woman with the tennis elbow who took you out at the ankles while quoting NICE guidelines.

There could be sponsorship. Local physios on standby. A discreet booth where you can upgrade to private mid-bout, rather like fast track at an airport. “For just £85, sir, you may bypass the semi final and proceed directly to a mildly interested locum.”

The beauty of the concept is that it restores honesty to the system. Demand exceeds supply. We all know it. Politicians say access is improving, which usually means a spreadsheet somewhere looks tidier. Meanwhile, actual humans are Googling their symptoms at midnight and convincing themselves they have a rare Peruvian fungus.

My show merely accepts reality and adds a referee.

Of course, there are drawbacks. The over 80s might struggle in the grappling stages, though I would not entirely bet against some of them. And it may be awkward explaining to Ofcom why a man with suspected gout is wielding a foam trident.

Still, it would be quicker than pressing option 3 for prescriptions and being cut off.

In truth, what irritates me is not the lack of appointments so much as the theatre around it. We pretend that if only we all refreshed the NHS app with sufficient civic virtue, the system would miraculously expand. It will not. Resources are finite. GPs are finite. Illness, regrettably, is not.

So perhaps a little absurdity would at least match the mood.

Anyway, I have not fully thought it through. I suspect the indemnity insurance would be prohibitive, and the sports hall is already booked on Tuesdays for Speed Dating.

You're a Porkie

For most of my life, I have operated under a comforting and largely unexamined assumption that humans, as a species, occupied an entirely separate culinary category from the rest of the animal kingdom. Not morally, you understand. Morally we are clearly worse than most animals. But biologically, I assumed we would at least taste distinctive. Something refined. Possibly faintly of Earl Grey and quiet disappointment.

It turns out this is not the case.

Biochemically speaking, human meat is, rather inconveniently, very similar to pork. So similar, in fact, that various Pacific cultures settled on the term “long pig” as a practical descriptor. Not an insult. Not satire. Just straightforward taxonomy. Short pig had four legs and rooted about in mud. Long pig had two legs and invented tax returns. From a culinary standpoint, the distinction was apparently one of posture rather than composition.

There is something deeply unsettling about the calm practicality of the phrase. No moral panic. No existential angst. Just a quiet nod to biochemical reality. Long pig. It has the tone of something you might find on a butcher’s chalkboard between “lamb shoulder” and “sausages.”

Modern science, with its usual flair for removing the last remaining layers of human dignity, has confirmed the comparison. The muscle fibres are similar. The fat composition is similar. The chemistry is similar. Strip away the layers of identity - the job titles, the car keys, the vague belief that one is more important than one actually is - and what remains is structurally very close to something that lives in a farmyard and has never once worried about mortgage rates.

It does rather puncture the grand narrative of human exceptionalism.

We like to think of ourselves as elevated. Civilised. Separate. We build institutions. We debate philosophy. We invent cryptocurrency. And beneath it all sits the quiet biochemical truth that, at a molecular level, we are simply long pig with access to broadband.

It also casts everyday life in a slightly different light. The gym, for example, ceases to be a temple of self improvement and becomes more of an optimisation facility. We are refining the long pig. Improving the tone. Reducing excess fat. Preparing the long pig for professional presentation.

Likewise, the entire edifice of modern society begins to look faintly absurd. Boardrooms full of long pig discussing quarterly performance. Long pig standing in supermarkets comparing olive oils. Long pig arguing on the internet with absolute certainty about things they understood perfectly five minutes ago and will forget entirely by Tuesday.

The phrase “long pig” endures precisely because of its uncomfortable accuracy. It reminds us that beneath the elaborate theatre of civilisation, beneath the suits and ceremonies and carefully curated identities, we remain biological organisms built from the same basic materials as everything else that walks, crawls, or roots around in a field.

We are not separate. We are not exempt. We are simply long pig who, through an improbable sequence of evolutionary accidents, acquired the ability to name ourselves - and, in doing so, accidentally revealed more than we intended.

The Minimum Wage

There is something quietly absurd about profitable businesses relying on the state to finish paying their staff. We have constructed an economic system in which a company can announce healthy margins, pay dividends, and congratulate itself on commercial success, while the taxpayer quietly subsidises its payroll through Universal Credit and housing benefit.

Strip away the jargon and that is what is happening. The public is helping to pay the wages of private employees so their employer can remain profitable.

If that sounds backwards, it is because it is.

In a functioning market economy, a business covers its own costs. Labour is a cost. Electricity is a cost. Rent is a cost. No serious person would argue that taxpayers should subsidise a company’s electricity bill so it can remain profitable. Yet when it comes to wages, this distortion has become normalised. Low pay is quietly topped up by the state, and the business model survives not because it is efficient, but because it is subsidised.

This creates a perverse inversion of capitalism. Risk and cost are socialised, while profit remains private.

Supporters of this arrangement retreat to a familiar warning whenever minimum wage rises are proposed. Businesses will collapse. Jobs will vanish. Prices will spiral. We have heard this before.

When the UK introduced the National Minimum Wage in 1999, business groups warned that up to two million jobs could be lost. It was presented as an existential threat to the economy. And yet employment rose by millions in the years that followed. Businesses adapted. The economy continued. The catastrophe never arrived.

What did happen was exactly what basic economics predicts. Prices adjusted modestly, and they adjusted together. One café did not suddenly become unviable while its competitors thrived. They all faced the same wage floor. Competition remained fair because the adjustment was universal.

At the same time, the very people receiving higher wages became better customers. They spent more. That money did not disappear. It flowed back into the economy, strengthening demand across the system. The economy did not shrink. It rebalanced.

Meanwhile, the same state that quietly subsidises low wages ensures unemployment support remains far below minimum wage income. This is not accidental. It is deliberate policy. Universal Credit provides subsistence, not replacement income. The purpose is clear: work must always be financially preferable to unemployment.

But consider the consequence. Workers are not negotiating from a position of strength. They are negotiating from a position where the alternative is hardship. This stabilises the supply of labour at the bottom of the market, even when wages are low. It ensures the system continues to function, but at the cost of embedding structural dependence on low pay.

At the same time, the same voices who insist the market must determine wages without interference are remarkably relaxed when the state intervenes to protect corporate profitability. When a major employer sustains an entire town, governments routinely step in with grants, tax breaks, infrastructure, or outright financial support. The justification is always the same: jobs must be protected.

Jim Ratcliffe provides a particularly vivid example. His company, INEOS, has benefitted from substantial public support over the years, including government backing for major industrial sites such as Grangemouth, infrastructure investment, and energy policy support designed to preserve British manufacturing jobs. Yet Ratcliffe himself chose to relocate to Monaco, placing his personal wealth beyond the reach of the UK tax system that helped sustain the industrial base underpinning his fortune.

This is entirely legal. But it reveals the asymmetry. Public money helps sustain the enterprise. Private wealth is free to detach itself from the public obligation that made it possible.

And often, governments justify such support on pragmatic grounds. The collapse of a major employer can devastate a community. But let us be honest about what this means. It is a political decision to preserve employment by transferring part of the cost onto the taxpayer. The public absorbs the risk so the company can continue operating. In both cases, the market outcome is being shaped by political choice. The only question is whether that choice protects corporate margins, or ensures workers are paid enough to live without public subsidy.

Critics sometimes retreat to one final technical objection. What about export industries, competing internationally? But export sectors rarely employ minimum wage workers in their core operations. Engineering firms, pharmaceutical companies, and advanced manufacturers depend on skilled labour paid well above the legal minimum. Where minimum wage roles exist, they are usually peripheral - cleaners, facilities staff, catering, or contracted services. The core export economy does not depend on poverty wages. The subsidy problem lies overwhelmingly in domestic sectors serving the local economy.

If a business cannot survive without the taxpayer quietly funding its wage bill, then its profitability is an illusion. It is not a triumph of enterprise. It is a triumph of accounting.

Minimum wage laws do not distort the market. They define its boundaries. They draw a simple line and say that if you employ someone full time, you must pay enough to sustain that employment. Not the taxpayer. You.

What follows is not economic collapse, but economic sorting. Businesses that create genuine value adapt and survive. Businesses that exist only because labour is artificially cheap, or quietly subsidised, must either improve or exit. That is not failure. That is the market functioning properly.

We know this because we have already seen it. The minimum wage was introduced. The warnings were dire. And yet employment rose, businesses survived, and the economy continued.

The uncomfortable truth is that some profits in Britain have been built not on innovation or productivity, but on costs quietly transferred to everyone else. Minimum wage laws do not break the system. They simply stop the public from quietly carrying part of it.

And that, perhaps, explains the noise.

The Populist - a Political Entrepreneur

The Galton and Denton by-election has raised the issue of left and right wing populism. Let's have a look at them and what makes they different.

There is a familiar character who turns up whenever politics starts to feel managerial and faintly smug. He does not arrive with a costed manifesto and a spreadsheet. He arrives with a story. He spots grievance rather than fiscal headroom. Where voters feel stalled or ignored, he senses opportunity. Where governments explain trade-offs, he promises resolution. That is the Political Entrepreneur.

Populism suits him because it is tidy. Politics becomes a moral drama between the virtuous people and the corrupt elites. It works on the left and on the right. The only real difference is who counts as “the people” and which elites are in the dock.

On the right, the people are usually defined in national and cultural terms. Sovereignty, borders and identity come first. The elites are liberal politicians, senior civil servants, judges, academics, media figures and supranational institutions. In other words, many of the very bodies that make liberal democracy function day to day. Supporters will say some of these institutions have drifted or overreached. The entrepreneur sharpens that into something harder: they are not merely mistaken, they are obstructive. They are frustrating the popular will.

In parts of Europe that rhetoric slides into talk of civilisational defence or cultural homogeneity. In the UK it is usually couched in the language of control and cohesion. But when courts and regulators are described as illegitimate barriers rather than constitutional guardrails, you are no longer just arguing about policy. You are edging towards arguing about whether the system itself is fair.

On the left, the picture looks different. The people are defined more broadly in socioeconomic terms. The dividing line is wealth and power, not ethnicity. Workers and renters of all backgrounds are said to be squeezed by corporate and financial elites. The anger is directed at concentrated private power rather than at judges or electoral processes. Fiscal limits are portrayed as choices that protect entrenched economic interests.

It is worth remembering that Labour itself began life as precisely this sort of insurgency. In the 1920s it was viewed as destabilising, captured by trade unions and threatening to the established order. It challenged economic elites and class privilege. Yet it did so by entering the parliamentary system, contesting elections and accepting defeat as well as victory. It widened democratic inclusion rather than questioning the legitimacy of the rules. Yesterday’s insurgent became today’s establishment.

That distinction matters. When the right trains its fire on judges, civil servants or independent oversight bodies, it is pointing at the scaffolding of the democratic system. When the left trains its fire on corporate or financial elites, it is pointing at market structures. Both can overpromise economically. Only one, in the contemporary European and UK pattern, more often risks eroding trust in the neutral machinery that makes democratic competition possible.

This is not to say the left is incapable of institutional overreach. In other regions, particularly parts of Latin America, left-populist governments have centralised authority when frustrated. The entrepreneurial temptation to blame obstruction rather than accept constraint is universal.

The common thread is simpler. To mobilise, you need a villain. Structural limits are dull. Bad elites are useful. Remove them and things will improve. Quickly.

That is where the arithmetic quietly slips out of view.

On the right, tax cuts or border controls are presented as straightforward fixes held back by liberal elites. On the left, large investment programmes are framed as being blocked by financial elites and timid technocrats. The awkward trade-offs that dominate real budgets are downplayed because they cool enthusiasm. The government has to explain why not everything can be done at once. The insurgent asks why it cannot.

When delivery falls short of the pitch, disappointment is sharp. And disappointment does not usually produce calm reflection. It produces the search for someone who sounds even more decisive.

The Political Entrepreneur may be sincere. But mobilisation comes before nuance. A clean story about elites blocking the people will always travel further than a careful explanation of debt dynamics.

He flourishes when trust is thin and progress feels slow. He struggles when institutions deliver visible improvement.

The real danger is not criticism of elites. Democracies need that. The danger begins when the institutions that referee the game are recast as players who must be removed. At that point, the argument is no longer about policy. It is about the rules themselves.

Terminator VI

It has been reported that a leading AI company declined to relax certain safeguards around how its systems may be used, particularly in defence settings, and that the US administration reacted with notable fury.

What might have been a technical dispute about guardrails quickly became a political row about who gets to decide how powerful AI tools are deployed - the elected government seeking strategic latitude, or the private firm insisting on limits.

And naturally, the word “woke” was wheeled out like an ageing pantomime villain.

Which is where my mind drifts, unhelpfully, to Skynet. You will recall that the engineers at Cyberdyne were not paralysed by ethical overreach. They were not convening stakeholder workshops on the lived experience of intercontinental ballistic missiles. They were brisk, confident men in suits, congratulating themselves on having removed slow, fallible humans from the nuclear decision chain. The machine would be faster. More rational. Free of hesitation.

It solved the problem by attempting to remove humanity altogether.

The moral of that story was never that caution was the enemy. It was that confidence without constraint can become catastrophic when married to immense power. Skynet was born not from excessive sensitivity but from institutional hubris and the logic of competition. There was a rival. There was a perceived threat. There was a belief that speed and autonomy were virtues in themselves. So they built it, switched it on and assumed control would remain comfortably in human hands.

Now, in the real world, if a developer suggests that certain uses of advanced AI ought to retain human oversight, this is framed by some as ideological softness. As if prudence were a scented candle in the server room. The politics of it are obvious enough. Cast tech executives as obstructive elites and you tap into a ready made grievance. It is good theatre.

But beneath the theatre sits an unglamorous strategic truth. Once one state deploys systems capable of acting faster than traditional command structures, the pressure on others to do likewise is intense. That is not science fiction. It is the dynamic that has driven every arms race from dreadnoughts to drones. In that environment, the instinct to build in friction is not decadence. It is a hedge against escalation.

So no, the developers of our fictional robot overlord were not woke. They were certain. They were efficient. They were in a hurry. History suggests that those qualities, untempered, are not always the ones you want at the helm of anything with launch codes.

The Benefits System is a Joke

The image appeared in my Facebook feed with the quiet fury of a woman who had just discovered that the welfare state had not been secretly mirroring her payslip.

Redundant from a £60k job, she declared the benefits system a joke.

I ventured what I thought was a perfectly pedestrian remark. Jobseeker’s Allowance and Universal Credit are a safety net, not income replacement. That is not ideology. It is the operating manual.

This was apparently incendiary.

The comments gathered with pitchfork efficiency. How could £400 a month possibly be a safety net? £400, I pointed out, is roughly the standard allowance for a single adult. It is not designed to sustain a middle-class lifestyle. It is designed to prevent you starving while you look for work.

This clarification did not calm matters. It merely shifted the outrage from “the system is rubbish” to “£400 is insulting”. At this point several people proposed that benefits should replace 80 percent of previous income, then taper gently down. A sort of state-funded glide path back to professional life.

All very sensible sounding. Entirely feasible. Provided one also supports significantly higher National Insurance contributions to fund it. Which is where the conversation developed a sudden allergy to detail.

Here lies the inescapable conclusion. If you want earnings-related unemployment insurance at meaningful levels, you must collect meaningful contributions during employment. Countries that do this have higher payroll taxes. This is not controversial. It is arithmetic.

British voters, however, have spent several decades reliably rejecting parties that propose higher taxation. They are extremely keen on well-funded public services, generous income protection, modern infrastructure and Scandinavian outcomes. They are markedly less keen on Scandinavian tax rates.

So we are left with the current arrangement. A modest safety net. Thin by continental standards. Cheap by continental standards. Entirely consistent with the tax levels the electorate repeatedly chooses.

The woman on £60k was not wrong to find £400 alarming. Anyone would. But the system did not malfunction. It delivered exactly what the country has collectively paid for.

There is something faintly heroic about demanding champagne while steadfastly voting for tap water. It is a very British form of optimism.

The Missing Croissant

Thursday is Middle of Lidl day, which is less a shopping trip and more a controlled archaeological dig through the ambitions of mankind.

You go in for milk and emerge having seriously considered purchasing a plasma cutter, thermal leggings, and something described only as a “precision rotary implement”. It is a place where logic loosens its grip and the human brain becomes unusually receptive to owning things it did not know existed twelve seconds earlier.

It was during this heightened cognitive vulnerability that Lidl informed me I had earned a free croissant.

I accepted this news with calm detachment. It was skinny day, so the croissant existed purely as an abstract nutritional concept intended for Hayley. I selected the fattest specimen not out of desire, but out of principle. If one is to accept a free croissant, one must do so properly. I scanned it. The machine acknowledged it. The croissant and I were, from a legal standpoint, briefly united.

And then I forgot about it.

This was entirely rational at the time. The croissant was not part of my personal economic framework. It was a third party asset. A diplomatic pastry. I packed my shopping, left the store, and drove home with the untroubled mind of a man whose croissant situation was, as far as he knew, fully resolved.

It was only when I began unpacking at home that the first crack in reality appeared.

Milk. Present. Yoghurt. Present. Random Middle of Lidl item whose function I will determine sometime in 2028. Present.

Croissant. Absent.

At first, I assumed it would reveal itself. Croissants are flamboyant creatures. They do not go quietly. But it did not emerge. I checked every bag with growing urgency, as though it might respond to a sufficiently authoritative tone. Nothing.

This was the precise moment the croissant achieved total psychological dominance. While it existed, I did not care. The moment it ceased to exist, it became the single most important object in the universe. Its absence filled the house. It accused me silently. Lidl had entrusted me with a croissant, and I had failed in my custodial duties.

Somewhere, it continues without me. Perhaps still on the packing shelf, staring into the middle distance, wondering why it was abandoned. Or perhaps it has already been claimed by another Middle of Lidl wanderer, a man who arrived seeking a cordless tyre inflator and left with something he did not earn.

This is the true danger of Middle of Lidl. You go in expecting nonsense. But occasionally, it gives you something meaningful.

And then, through carelessness, you lose it.

I did not care about the croissant.

Until I understood that it had cared about me.

By-Election Blues - Sorry, Greens

We are told, in suitably apocalyptic tones, that the sky has fallen in because of a by-election in Gorton and Denton. Labour down, Greens up, Reform up, Conservatives and Lib Dems barely visible. Cue the usual chorus about collapse, betrayal and historic turning points, as if a mid-term local contest were the constitutional equivalent of 1945.

Let us calm down. Governments two years in nearly always lose vote share in by-elections, particularly on middling turnout. Voters know the government is not going to fall, so they feel entirely free to register irritation without consequence. It is political horn-honking. It makes a noise, but it does not change the engine.

Starmer inherited high debt, high tax as a share of GDP, weak growth and bond markets that still have the September 2022 episode seared into memory. There is no secret vault of unused billions behind the Treasury sofa. The fiscal envelope is tight because the arithmetic is tight. Anyone who thinks a different Prime Minister can simply wish that away is indulging in magical thinking.

So what, precisely, do people expect a Reform or Green government to change that would materially improve things in short order? Reform can cut migration, but it cannot repeal demographics, labour shortages or debt interest payments. The Greens can borrow and invest more, but they cannot abolish market scrutiny or the need to service that borrowing. The constraints would remain, however loudly one denounced them on the campaign trail.

What we are seeing is not a sudden national conversion to alternative fiscal blueprints. It is impatience. Labour’s majority was built on a broad coalition united by a desire to eject the Conservatives. Broad churches win elections, but they are uncomfortable in office because delivery within constraints is necessarily incremental. When improvement is marginal rather than dramatic, voters conclude that not enough is changing.

The Greens’ surge in that seat reflects local credibility and tactical consolidation on the left. Reform’s rise reflects a similar consolidation of anti-system sentiment on the right once the Conservatives looked non-competitive. First past the post rewards that compression. Once voters think there is a viable challenger, they coalesce around it, not because they have studied every policy line, but because it feels like the sharpest instrument available.

Yes, the macro indicators may be edging in the right direction. Inflation down from its peak, real wages slowly improving, trade friction with the EU being eased at the margins. But voters do not live in aggregates; they live in monthly bills and service experiences. If life still feels tight, “moving in the right direction” sounds like an economist’s consolation prize rather than tangible relief.

From a spreadsheet perspective, swinging to Reform or the Greens does not loosen the fiscal constraints one inch. From a human perspective, it is a way of saying that the pace of change feels too slow and the benefits too abstract. That may be economically unsatisfying, but it is politically predictable.

The real risk for Labour is not that this by-election heralds immediate catastrophe. It is that statistical improvement fails to translate into lived improvement quickly enough. Until voters feel the difference rather than read about it, they will continue to tap the glass and demand something more dramatic, even if the laws of arithmetic remain stubbornly in place.

The Rogue Decimal Point

There is a particular sort of financial genius that involves making money from a credit card while never actually being in debt. It is not glamorous. It does not involve hedge funds. It involves paying for the weekly shop, collecting the points, and then moving the exact same money across from the current account roughly half a nanosecond later. The bank imagines it has lured you into its velvet-lined parlour. In reality you are there with a clipboard, timing them.

Over three or four years this has produced about a thousand pounds in rewards. Free money. Not life changing, but enough to irritate the institution providing it, which is satisfaction enough.

Unfortunately, the weak link in this otherwise elegant system is the human input device, namely me.

The problem is the decimal point. Or rather, the absence of it. A transfer of £65.50 becomes £6,550 with a single inattentive tap. £40.18 becomes £4,018. The app does not blink. It does not cough politely and ask whether I am quite certain I wish to move a month’s council tax in order to clear a sandwich. It simply obeys. Ruthlessly.

There is something uniquely deflating about realising you have just transferred several thousand pounds to your own credit card in a fit of typographical enthusiasm. The satisfaction of gaming the rewards system drains away rather quickly when your current account looks as though you have bought a modest hatchback by mistake.

Reversing the transaction via the app is, naturally, impossible. That would be convenient. Instead one must telephone the bank and explain, in a calm and measured voice, that no, one did not mean to move £4,018 to settle a £40.18 petrol purchase. Yes, it was a decimal issue. Again. No, I am not laundering money. Yes, I appreciate the call is being recorded for training purposes, which I assume means someone in a back office is enjoying this immensely.

The tone of the call handler is always professional, but one senses a flicker of suppressed curiosity. Who is this man who repeatedly overpays his credit card by the price of a Mediterranean cruise? Is he reckless. Is he confused. Or is he attempting some advanced financial manoeuvre that has gone badly wrong.

The truth is far less glamorous. I am trying to extract supermarket vouchers from a multinational bank without paying them a penny in interest, and occasionally I type like a distracted Labrador.

The real irritation is that the system is designed to tolerate incompetence in one direction only. If I had underpaid, interest would arrive with mechanical efficiency. Overpay by thousands and it requires a conversation, an explanation, and what feels suspiciously like gentle amusement on the other end of the line.

Still, I remain ahead on the scoreboard. The rewards continue. The bank continues to hope I will slip into revolving debt. And I continue to wage war with a decimal point that has cost me nothing except dignity and a few recorded phone calls that are probably still circulating in the staff break room.