THERE’S a magnet on our fridge with the phrase “Help! I turned into my mother” on it. But this week, I fear I am actually turning into my dad – and it’s all the fault of energy prices.

One of the things which really got my goat when I was a teenager was my dad’s penchant for going around the house turning things off.

All I would have to do was temporarily leave my room and his watt-wastage ESP would mean he’d be in there in a flash, turning the light and TV off, and the light at the top of the stairs, to boot.

I was usually only off on a visit to the loo, or downstairs to grab a drink or bowl of cereal, or to pet the dog, and so I’d head back up there and find myself in total darkness, having to go round and turn everything back on again.

If I dared to pop into another room to visit my mother or brother, his head would instantly appear at the door in an almost Jack Nicholson in The Shining manner bearing a furious expression and the ferocious query: ”Is that bloody TV on in your room?!”

As with many, many other things, however, as I am now a parent and bill-payer myself, I understand exactly where poor old Dad was coming from.

When our daughter is a teenager, I may probably behave in the same way to her. Even worse, she’ll probably have numerous technological gadgets draining the pot and our bank account, rather than a simple TV and light.

In these tough times, saving the pennies so the pounds (hopefully) take care of themselves has taken on a new level of importance.

So now it’s me going round turning off everything, refusing to turn on the heating until we’re blue in the face and body, and fretting about insulation, draught excluders and heavier curtains.

In particular, I have a worrying obsession with the spotlights in our house – you know, the wee circular lights now commonly used in modern design instead of one good big light or a fluorescent tube.

I happened to catch some consumer programme which gave a worrying statistic on how they’re the worst energy guzzlers in any home, costing some horrendous amount of pence per hour to run, and I have been utterly petrified since.

We have eight in our hall and six in the kitchen, so when the Other Half left the latter on unnecessarily for several hours at the weekend, (everyone was out/elsewhere), I almost, as we say in Northern Ireland, had to be worked with.

Maybe I just need to get a life?