THERE was a time, in the 1960s, when, instead of dreaming about winning the pools, which was the equivalent of the Lottery in those days, people imagined themselves striking oil in their back gardens.
The sheikhs of the Middle East and the Sultan of Brunei – not to mention The Beverly Hillbillies – had shown the quickest route to riches was through black gold.
Then in the 1970s it happened – not, alas, in someone's back garden, but in Britain's f
ront water feature, the North Sea.
Not only oil, but natural gas was discovered beneath the waves and the dangerous and expensive business of getting it out began.
There would be, we were told, a huge national dividend from all this and although no one of us unfamiliar with the boardrooms of oil prospecting companies was going to be a billionaire, we were all going to be a lot better off.
Furthermore, Britain would be independent in terms of energy production and would not have to grovel to the Gulf states any more when the cartels decided on a price hike.
Gas would be the solution to much more of our energy requirements and even quite remote villages were joined onto the network so they could all benefit from cheaper central heating.
If you had prophesied, in those halcyon days, that within 40 years the price of petrol would be over £6 a gallon and we would be at the whim of the Ukraine for our gas supplies, people would have laughed at you.
So where did it all go?
Did it cost that much to make Scotland affluent?
Somehow one feels successive governments must have failed to husband the resources and the profits properly, and probably turned them to their own political ends.
Fans of that 1960s classic TV dramatisation of The Forsyte Saga, will remember that no Forsyte ever spends capital.
Capital exists to be invested to produce income.
But that was Victorian thinking. By the time Britain found itself inheritor of an unexpected windfall it had thrown those values out of the window long ago and was happily squandering its new-found wealth with as much vigour as the most determined Dartie whom Galsworthy could ever have created.
Resources proved finite – at least in the case of the North Sea.
It is unclear to me why there appears to be no apparent end in sight to similar resources in the Middle East or in America.
You may have received one of the many e-mails flying around urging one to some course of action which, if carried on by 30 million people at the same time, would be sure to bring down the price of oil.
One of them suggests boycotting Esso and BP on the basis that they are the market leaders and if they suffer they will have to bring down their prices and all the rest will follow. In your dreams.
Another suggests that the cause of the problem is people turning greener and using less fuel, so that the price has to go up to compensate. Therefore, it maintains, we should buy more fuel as fast as we can go, thereby increasing consumption and bringing down the price. I don't think I'll bother with that one.
Then there are those who, with the unerring instinct of vultures about the corpse of the prime minister, are railing at the massive taxation levels on fuel, which make Britain the most expensive place for the motorist.
Well, it's summer, and in that season we often hear from afar the call of the bleating motorist.
He would rather, he moans, pay for the French payage system than have roads funded out of fuel tax – that way he could avoid paying at all by thundering through towns and villages all the time.
The plain fact is we've had it rather good for more than 30 years and now it's over – and we've got to pay for it.
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