The oil delivery man had way too much swagger and, as he waved his nozzle about, I realised that he might be expecting a little something.

Oh dear, I thought, as he pushed the nozzle into my oil tank, pressed the button on his lorry and spent less than ten seconds giving me the amount of oil I could afford.

Oh dear, what if the oil crisis is now at such fever pitch that desperate housewives in remote places are offering a little something on the side to get more oil?

Ten seconds’ worth of oil did feel like the end of the world. Usually, I can afford to let the lorry fill the entire tank and it comes to about a grand. Now the cost of filling the tank is nearer two grand, so I decided to order €300 worth to tide me over and hope that Mr Trump wins the first war ever won in the Middle East, backs down or has a personality bypass quite soon. If you’re on oil you have to hope for a miracle.

What if the oil crisis is at such fever pitch that desperate housewives are offering a little something on the side?

For about nine seconds I prayed for the sound of the liquid to keep going before it stopped and the oil man pulled his nozzle out with a flourish and gave me a smirk.

He stood by his lorry in my backyard with his engine running and the pump still running and he looked at me and he smirked.

I laughed nervously. ‘I usually do fill up, only I’m waiting to see if… well, you know, I can’t do a fill…’

‘Oh,’ he said, breezily, ‘you couldn’t do a fill…’ And he just stood there.

Did he want an off-the-books cash tip to stick his nozzle back in? Or an offer of something else? Not really my type, I thought. A bit short. Stop it! I told myself.

I was imagining all this, of course I was. I do have a vivid imagination. But also, I’m very intuitive. I have got to know the two or three oil delivery men over the nearly three years we have been in rural Ireland and they have always just filled my tank, clattered their nozzle back into place, pushed a pink invoice at me, climbed into their lorry and driven off.

This one was definitely lingering, giving me very odd looks. When he left, I stuck my measuring stick into the tank to see what I had got and when I pulled it out showing less than a third full I actually felt relieved it was that much. Then I started scraping the dip stick against the inside mouth of the tank so that every last molecule of oil went back inside. It felt obscene to let even one drop fall to the floor.

We installed a new oil boiler system for hot water and heating, rather than eco heat pumps or solar panels that don’t work, because we started doing this Airbnb business. So we have to produce enough hot water for people to shower themselves crazy in our house. You can’t imagine how much showering some people do when they climb into someone else’s shower.

I had two French cyclists last summer who ran the shower in the king-sized en suite for so long I thought they had fallen asleep in there.

People run the hot water until they not only run out the hot water, they drain the water tanks down so it takes hours for them to refill.

Our water comes from a natural spring in the hillside above and is stored in tanks and then pumped around the house with electric pumping machines. As for electricity, it’s many times the cost here than in most of Europe.

In fact, inflation is at such a rampant rate across the board that I went down to the village the other day, picked a small bottle of mouthwash off the shelf in the pharmacy, and when I got it to the till the woman said ‘€9’.

‘No, you don’t understand, I want this small bottle of mouthwash.’

‘Yes,’ she said, ‘it’s €9.’ (I notice it’s also €9 for a chicken in the local supermarket. Maybe the plan here is to just make everything €9.)

‘It’s mouthwash,’ I said. ‘It can’t be €9.’

‘It’s €9,’ she said. (About £8.)

‘But I could buy a bottle of wine for that,’ I said (not that I drink). ‘It would be cheaper to gargle in a decent Côte du Rhône.’ She shrugged.

There was a woman I know standing behind me. I turned and tried to engage her. ‘€9?’ I said. She looked uninterested and said: ‘Oh, I’ve been meaning to ask, have you any rooms for 29 May?’ It was her son’s wedding and she had guests to put up. I said I thought I had two for that date.

Great, she said, because she’d like to book them. I said I would text her the Airbnb link as we don’t do anything off the books. She said that was fine.

Later, after I sent the link, with a goodwill discount applied to the date she wanted, she asked a few questions but pointedly did not book the rooms, even though I made clear that they’d be gone soon if she didn’t book quickly.

She probably looked at them and could not believe the price of a room in my cranky old house is more than €100 a night.

If anyone asks me how I work out my prices from now on, I will say this: a small bottle of mouthwash in Nowheresville, West Cork is €9. That is the base line. Therefore, the price of a bed for the night, with breakfast and unlimited hot showering and the ability to run an entire hillside of water dry, and all the electricity needed to pump that, cannot be any less than ten times the cost of a bottle of mouthwash. This, I feel, is a more than scientific way of doing basic economics.