The fuel crisis is almost enough to drive me back to drink

Trudy Tyler’s WFH sanity stroll is disturbed by angry motorists and a neighbour protecting her poultry. By Christine Manby

(Tom Ford)

Ten days into Sober October and I still haven’t given in to the siren call of the Sauvignon Blanc, though goodness knows life in BoJo’s Britain has been throwing up plenty of reasons to reach for a drink. There’s a febrile atmosphere in SW12 as the petrol crisis continues. Whenever there’s the slightest whiff of unleaded, the queue from the Sainsbury’s petrol station on Nightingale Lane stretches all the way back to Clapham South tube. To give you an idea of how long that is, it takes five minutes to cover on foot. That’s five minutes walking alongside a queue of angry drivers leaning on their horns and threatening murder to any hapless idiot who tries to turn across the queue to, I dunno, get into their own driveway or something selfish like that.

Never have I been so grateful that I can live without my car, though I have been getting in and turning on the engine every morning to check that no one has siphoned off my petrol overnight. There’s still half a tank, which is enough to get me to Mum’s in the event of the complete breakdown of society, though, to be fair, the apocalypse would probably start in her village, which split into two warring factions after the Great Garden Show Incident of 1984. There was a brief period of peace while they were all campaigning for Brexit.

It’s not just petrol that’s in short supply. On Tuesday, one of my new WFH days, I took my usual sanity stroll in the direction of Tooting Common and bumped into my neighbour Brenda. She was dragging two enormous wheelie cases.