It’s tank warfare... and drivers have to pay the penalty

I reset the milometer and set off on the 44 mile journey home. I made it. The following morning, I got within three miles of the office, and ran out of fuel. The milometer informed me I had done 85 miles.

I live in a rural area. My 1.3 litre Vauxhall Corsa is horribly unsuitable, but in terms of fuel economy, it’s at the better end of the scale. I sold the 4x4 I used to drive when it became an extravagance, and paid the price when we were all snowed in for a week at Christmas.

Now, and I hope somebody in authority is paying attention, have a look at my life. Four days a week, I complete an 88 mile round trip to the office. To be sure of making it there and back, and having enough in the tank for emergencies, I’m looking at around £70 a week.

Five days a week, my partner makes a 66 mile round trip to and from work in the NHS in her Suzuki Swift. That’s another £70.

At the moment, our household is forking out almost £600 a month just so we can get to work. At the weekend, we like to do old-fashioned things like spend time with the children and take them to their various clubs and commitments.

To decide which of us will have the honour of finding the extra few quid this will take from our individual budgets, we play Paper, Scissors, Stone. Normally, I hiss and spit about this state of affairs between gritted teeth and with wild and staring eyes – transformed into a picture of incredulous rage every time the fuel light comes on.

Over the past couple of years, I have watched the prices at the petrol pumps the way other people watch the Lottery.

The smooth-running and relative comfort of my life genuinely depends on the combination of numbers below the BP sign.

And unless the numbers start to fall, I’m in serious trouble. It’s only a couple of years back I was paying £1 a litre and struggling to believe how pricey it was to be a motorist.

Three years ago, I took the family to Norfolk for a holiday and saw that the locals were paying £1.10 a litre for fuel. It was a genuinely head-turning moment. As I put enough fuel in the tank to get us back to a region with more sensible prices, I lectured the kids on how they should remember this moment, as Daddy never thought he would see the day.

This morning, I passed a garage where they were charging £1.39.9p a litre – a price on sheer principle I refused to pay. As a consequence, I ran out of fuel three miles from work.

So, what’s to be done? Well, like so many others, my family is left with a difficult choice. Do we move? Do we uproot the kids from good schools so either myself or my partner can be nearer the office? Is that really any kind of question? Do we get smaller cars? That’s virtually impossible. If I got a 1.1 Citroen C1, I would save a few quid, but the first snows would kill it.

Do we take public transport? Well, to get from my house to my office I would have to take two buses and a train. If I set off from home at 7am, I could be at work by 11.41am. I would have to set off for home again just after 1pm if I had any hope of making the connection.

Car share? That’s a terrific idea. I’d love it if my next door neighbour or anybody in my village worked where I work. But they don’t. And given I do odd shifts and have to pick up children on the way home, any car-share scheme would be more akin to a limo service.

So, Mr Osborne, where does that leave us? Well, it leaves us in serious trouble. When we moved to our current home two years ago we budgeted for fuel costs, and now, that budget doesn’t work. We can’t afford it. If the prices creep up any further, one of us will have to quit work.

We like working. We’re good at what we do. We’ve never been unemployed, have always paid our taxes and are trying to imbue in the kids the belief that if you work hard and don’t waste your money, you can afford to go for a pizza on a weekend. How wrong we were.

We watched the Budget with interest. Would George have a trick up his sleeve? Would he announce that the Government had found a way to stabilise the cost of fuel at £1 a litre for the next two years?

No. A penny, George? A penny? Seriously?

For me and thousands like me, the road ahead looks very, very dark.