A cleverly worded email has arrived from British Gas to explain why, despite the Prime Minister’s announcement, my gas and electricity is going to rise to £3,761.60 a year.

When I say this email was well worded, I mean it was a master class in stating the indefensible while making it appear reasonable.

You could tell that what they had wanted to type was: ‘Listen here, Missy. That Liz Truss might have told you she’s capping energy prices but we are here to tell you it will be a cold day in hell before that happens. (Leaving hell aside, which we are trying to work up a new tariff for, a cold day in your little house is happening imminently.)

‘From October, your gas bill is not going to be £2,500 or less because you are what we like to call “above average use”. She worked for us lot, by the way. Did you know that? Joined Shell as a graduate trainee: commercial manager for liquid natural gas shipping and contract negotiation, that was her title. So don’t get all excited thinking your terraced cottage is going to be cheaper than you thought to heat this winter. It’s not. You can give up on any fancy ideas you might have about being able to afford the odd hot bath and you can knuckle down to cold, hard desperation. Oh, and by the way, you’re £491 in credit. We’re holding on to your money because the last time you tried to tell us your meter reading we accidentally couldn’t let you submit the reading on our system in time and we had to drastically overestimate your bill – and your usage, just in time for the price rise. We can’t be out of pocket, as I’m sure you will understand. Goodbye, and happy woolly jumper wearing!’

But of course, they were not that straightforward. Instead, they stated that: ‘From 1 October, the cost of energy for the average home will be no more than £2,500 a year for the next two years. However, your bill could be higher or lower depending on the size of your home, how many people live there and how much energy you use. Your estimate: £2,937.02 for gas and £824.58 for electricity.’

Turns out the £2,500 figure refers to a notional average family using 12,000 kWh a year paying by direct debit – if you use more, you will pay more.

And if they claim you use more, you will pay more, as has happened to me. Because I don’t use more, but they don’t seem to acknowledge my meter readings, preferring instead to amass my money in a ‘credit’ system that always overestimates my usage no matter how much I try to enter my readings on time. And so they appear to have based this scary new price on the last incorrect estimation they made a while back.

I entered my meter reading a week before the deadline again this time, and a few days later the system sent me an email telling me to enter my meter reading.

I don’t think it will make any difference how many times I enter it. The system wants what it wants. And it wants all our energy usages to be above the new energy cap, even when they are not.

Of course, I don’t know who exactly thought up the idea of making this cap apply only to homes where the inhabitants miraculously, possibly by moving to Barbados for the winter, use under that amount anyway, and not apply to homes where desperate families with kids needing baths and clean clothes are above that amount.

But let’s face it, it was extremely clever of whoever came up with this to devise an energy capping scheme where the only people who qualify are those who can prove that their usage is so low there never was any danger of them going near the threshold in the first place.

Whoever came up with such a system was a right old brainbox, but they should know that their ingenuity has led to some unintended consequences.

They are making the builder boyfriend into a socialist, for example. A hot bath is all that makes his aching joints stop hurting before he clambers on a roof again the next day.

He rails endlessly about the new serfdom and the great reset. What can I do? This is what the working man thinks. You can’t blame him.

I wish I could turn off the boiler to spite them. ‘How can we turn off the boiler to spite them?’ I keep asking him.

He says it’s possible to re-plumb the hot water to run off the log burner. But that’s a big job. I fear it cannot be done in time to stop the BB voting Labour, who will probably then ban log burners.