I am currently trying to buy a car in Canadia. I don’t want anything special, I don’t want to pay much, I just need something solid that will work well for a few weeks. Unfortunately, it has to be a big chunky 4*4; not for cosmetic reasons but because I need to be in the middle of nowhere in places with no roads in the middle of winter in Canadia.

The European in me is getting more and more distressed. I never really saw myself as a major environmentalist – My view on Global Warming is that if I get rasberries in December and Holland becomes one big swimming pool then that is a generally good thing. The problem is that I am opposed to very literally burning money which I don’t have and wasting fuel the planet is running out of. Is it too much to ask for fuel consumption figures to be posted with car reviews? Is it possible to get fuel consumption figures without digging through tonnes and tonnes of data hidden away in the digital equivalent of a hay-barn? Ha! Is it buggery!

What I find odd is that North Americans have started complaining about the cost of petrol nowadays and with fuel in Canadia at just under a dollar a litre you’d think they’d start to want to know how much of it their 1997 Chevrolet Tahoe LTs are drinking on an average drive from the Lumberjackery to Tim Hortons and back (11 miles per gallon is the best figure I can get, though that is probably US gallons, and I think they are smaller than real ones).

If you are ever bored one day go to a US or Canadian car sales site, have a look for a few cheap cars and then set yourself the task of working out which you should buy in terms of how much fuel they waste. Remember! You can’t use the European figures most of the time because the American ones tend to come with different engine configurations with especially big fuel burning bits. It’s fun, I promise you!