Advertising which gives a brand topical relevance gets extra traction with its target audience. So if I was creating the advertising for AMPOL I would now be advising them to run posters printed with nothing but their logo and the headline AMPLE. Despite Mr Albanese’s wordier reassurances, TikTok is already replete with phone footage of Australian bowser rage, and many of us have been panic petrol purchasing. PPP means stopping at every service station you see to keep your tank full (on my last visit I spent more on Mars Bars than petrol), or buying supplies surplus to immediate requirements, aka hoarding. Unfortunately, I couldn’t get to Bunnings before they sold out of jerry cans, so instead I have bought a queen size air mattress from Anaconda and the back of my ute is now a major fire hazard.

While living in Manhattan I realised that for all their worldliness and sophistication, my neighbours were, in one important respect, identical to the famously unworldly and unsophisticated Amish. These are the only two communities in the US, after all, for whom the price of gasoline is not an election issue – the internal combustion engine still deemed the Devil’s handiwork in parts of Pennsylvania, and the cost and difficulty of parking in Manhattan deterring most of its residents from car ownership. But if Mr Trump does get a kicking in the midterms, as most New Yorkers are hoping, it will not be because a gasoline shortage has prevented his Maga base transporting their bloated offspring to the mall to top up their corn syrup and trans fat levels. Thanks to Mr Trump’s replacement of net zero targets with drill-baby-drilling incentives, the US now needs Middle Eastern oil like a humpback whale needs a second hole in the head. It will rather be because halfway through his second term he has not only failed to put an end to the foreign war he promised to stop on Day 1 of Trump 2.0, but he has also gotten the US embroiled in another, even more costly foreign conflict. If only, his supporters are complaining, he had settled for partitioning Venezuela and invading Canada, which, in addition to having between them more oil than the entire Middle East, also play baseball.

It remains to be seen whether the third attempt to assassinate Mr Trump will affect his election prospects the way the first one did. But in the meantime, if I was a far-left conspiracy theorist, I would be wondering why not one of the shots fired at such close range by all those highly trained Secret Service officers so much as grazed Cole Thomas Allen. Could it be, my TikTok posts would be asking, that the whole thing was a false flag op confected by Team Trump to boost his dwindling poll ratings? And that in addition to being assured the shots would miss, and having several million dollars deposited in an offshore account, and being promised that if he identifies as a woman before his trial he can share a cell with Ghislaine Maxwell, Mr Allen has also been guaranteed a last-day-of-office (i.e. Jan 2029) presidential pardon? By echoing the absolution offered to Charlie Kirk’s murderer by his saintly widow an act of such Christian forgiveness would also reset Mr Trump’s relationship with the 60 million US Catholics he has upset – the Pope amongst them – by conflating himself with Jesus.

The most immediate impact the Middle East crisis has had on Australians is in long-haul air travel, with many already changing carriers or cancelling trips entirely rather than fly through a war zone. But since no Iranian missiles have come close to any UAE airport for several weeks now this fear seems to me to be comparable to that of Sydneysiders who, two months after a small spike in shark attacks up and down the NSW coast, are still reluctant to swim in the harbour. More importantly, I know from my own experience that one man’s cancellation is another man’s upgrade. For a long time after the 2014 disappearances of MH370 and MH17, I was able to fly business class to London with Malaysian Airlines for not much more than Qantas’s premium economy, the only danger being the one posed by the welcome-aboard satay to passengers with peanut allergies. Being more frightened of jinx than jihad I won’t name the airline I’ll be flying with to the UK next month, but I will say that the fare bargain I found this time requires me to not just transfer at a Persian Gulf airport, but to overnight in a hotel next to it. I am a bit nervous, though, about an event I will take part in at my final destination. A mass swim in a northern lake which, thanks to its bone-chilling temperature and record pollution levels, presents a more serious health hazard than the most shark-infested Australian estuary. So if this turns out to be my last Aussie Life column you’ll know why.