(That’s opposed to the Bibby Stockholm Syndrome, something that the government hopes will occur to asylum seekers to make them think they are living on a flat-pack IKEA-built floating Scandinavian Island rather than a gloomy barge in Dorset being divebombed by equally baffled seagulls looking to pick up some sour herring.) It’s like we’ve all been (air) conditioned to believe that the energy companies are our friends, and we are all in it together – a weird kind of Stockholm Syndrome that makes you reluctantly accept being either being very poor or very cold. So, this summer, just as a good old British hosepipe ban begins, and our boiling hot homes become magnets for bluebottles because we’ve got the back door open and they can smell the cat’s food, we can ‘just’ about afford to put the heating on…Īnd yet – apart from in my house where I got a bit hot under the collar but luckily didn’t have to pay for self-generated heat – I can’t see more widespread anger. Indeed, this week we were told the supposedly ‘good news’ that average energy prices are to drop £440-a-year to a still too eye-wateringly high £2,062.91 a year from JULY. Our captors in this case are the energy companies – constantly gaslighting us (and probably over charging us for the extra gas use) about how they are feeling the pinch just as much as millions of British people are. It’s a bit like that Russian roulette scene in The Deer Hunter, only not expecting a bullet from our captors, instead it’s the arrival of potentially life altering bill – in my case £919 and 53 British pence.

I pressed submit and awaited the results.

I'll Be Taking This by Olivia T. Turner