There have been two times in my life when I have witnessed fuel rationing. The first was in 1956 during the Suez Crisis. Although I was only eight, the queue of motorcars at the garage on the way to school was remarkable enough to make me realise that something exceptional was happening.

Although I didn’t realise it at the time (our family didn’t have a car then), formal rationing was reintroduced for the five months between December 1956 and May 1957 after Egypt had blocked the Suez Canal.

The second event was in 1973 during the Yom Kippur War, when I was by then a car owner and needed the car for work. It could take hours to get to the front of the queue and then many garages were limiting customers to two gallons only.

At that time, as I recall, the government actually issued ration books – paper things which had a curiously old-fashioned look about them, redolent of WWII rationing (which lasted until 1950). The books were never used but it was a close call.

Although there were brief supply interruptions in the year 2000, during the fuel protests, there was never any real difficulty filling the tank, despite local shortages caused by panic buying, this means that there are effectively two generations who have never experienced real shortages and have thus tended to take uninterrupted supplies for granted.

However, given the propensity for closures of waterways in the Middle East to cause major perturbations – the Egyptian closure of the Straits of Tiran to Israeli shipping in 1967 having triggered the Six-Day War – one might have thought that the closure of the Strait of Hormuz might have been taken a little bit more seriously by the European powers than seems to be at the moment.

Read more: Dire straits