Well, I’m quite glad that’s over. We may kid ourselves that we’re all Mediterranean and like nothing better than spending August in pavement cafes, wearing flip-flops and optimistic clothing while pretending London is the south of France, but actually we’re rather better at being autumnal sorts. I spent my holiday in waterproofs and wellies, making brisk remarks to the children about how “the sea’s wet anyway, so who cares about the rain?”, but despite my devotion to holidaying in England - it's been Devon and Cornwall for a good six years now - I do, this year, experience slight pangs of envy when I see anybody with even the suggestion of a tan.

Everyone I know who has holidayed in this country, myself included, has come back looking pasty and weighing an extra half a stone, since eating enormous numbers of cream teas and/or finishing off that bottle at lunchtime struck everyone as jollier than scrutinising rock pools in the pouring rain or surfing in drizzle. This year the diet starts four months early.

Now it’s back to school (do adults ever shake off the feeling that they’re going back to school too? I always have a panicky feeling that I should have revised more or made an effort with my Latin vocab). Preschool boosters have been administered, everyone’s been for their dental check-up, we’ve negotiated the horrors of buying a uniform in understaffed department stores with hordes of bad-tempered women trying to make grumpy teenagers try on the stupid grey trousers on the shop floor (my older children were so unhelpful and annoying that I left them in Brent Cross shopping centre; it was either that or me turning into the child from The Exorcist in the middle of Marks & Spencer).

The terrors of the four-year-old’s First Day at School have been negotiated - chipper child, broken-husk parents - and finally, after the interminable summer, everyone is back where they belong. There’s something very satisfying about this: it makes you want to buy opaque tights, light fires and start cooking stews.

Less satisfying are the endless headlines about falling house prices, recession, fuel costs and every single thing that you need becoming prohibitively expensive. Perversely I’m rather loving them, mostly because I am happy to observe that the decades of vulgar excess are finally over. I was speaking about this to a friend last week and we were both retrospectively astonished about how we lived eight or nine years ago - we were, we concluded, like mad people, or at least delusional ones: weekend pads in the country (paid for by overdraft), regular blowdries (ditto), dinners in expensive restaurants (tritto), thinking nothing about buying handbags that cost the upper end of three figures (quadritto). What did we think we were doing? It’s not as if we could afford it.

Oddly, the fact that we can afford it even less nowadays - as in, not at all - comes as rather a relief. I may be entirely alone in feeling that the flashiness that had become commonplace was getting really nauseating, but I’m glad it’s on the way out. Living in a society where it is considered normal for young women on modest salaries to feel it is important to buy £700 handbags, or to dress in top-to-toe designer outfits, or to blow most of the week’s wages on “partying”, isn’t sane or impressive - no matter how much they want to pretend to live like a pop star (an ambition which, in itself, can only result in misery, since it’s never going to be realised). The financial situation has kiboshed that whole scenario and I can’t say I’m sorry. It all got a bit much there for a minute (or a decade).

The belt-tightening that has become necessary may feel like unjust punishment - is unjust punishment - but it has advantages; you could even argue that this particular cloud has an especially sparkling silver lining. Just think: no more infants in designer clothing, but a return to the loveliness of hand-me-downs. No more drinking perfectly ordinary cocktails at upwards ofa tenner a pop in some overdesigned bar, but hanging out with friends at home with a couple of bottles of wine and lasagne in the oven. No more (I ardently hope) going mad at Christmas and spending crazy amounts on an occasion that lasts a mere day, but instead buying the children one great present and leaving it at that.

No more going in search of entertainment as though we were all jaded cynics looking for stimulation, but rather cosying up at home with a book (I read the best comfort book since Nancy Mitford on holiday - The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society by Mary Ann Shaffer). No more panic-buying of the latest It dress, bag or shoes, but making do with what you have and feeling happy about it, because it really doesn’t matter that much.

I could go on (and I have - I’ve writtena book about the joys of the New Thrift, it’s out in November), but you probably get the idea: what seems like a depressing time - rain, recession, getting a shock every time you fill up the car with petrol - can, witha little ingenuity and provided you weren’t on the breadline to start off with, have unpredictably cheering results on the home front. Rather good for children, too: if they’ve lived in boom times ever since they were born, a little bit of bust serves as a welcome reminder of what real life is like.

There’s no denying that some people are feeling the pinch in a way that causes them sleepless nights and I don’t mean to make light of their anxieties. But, combined with the washout of a summer we’ve just had, there is a strong collective sense of us all coming back down to earth. It’s like a huge national reality check and, unwelcome as it may be, there is a possibility that it will result in us straightening out our priorities. The fact of the matter is that, although it may be a great bore to have to restrict our shopping to the window variety, most of us have enough stuff.

Accumulating yet more isn’t what matters, regardless of the kind of stuff frenzy that we’ve been in since the 1980s. What matters is family, friends, hanging out, making soup, being healthy and safe. None of those things can be bought. If recession has any virtue, it is this: it refocuses the mind on what actually matters. Happy autumn.

+ Women may find Sarah Palin, John McCain’s running mate, terrifyingly off-putting, but every man I've spoken to this week, of every political persuasion, has told me how much they fancy her. Like, really fancy her.

I naturally fulfilled my journalistic obligation by quizzing a number of them as to why this should be. The result is: they fancy her because she looks like a porn star, specifically a porn star playing the “good” girl who’s about to do something very, very bad.

“She’s the ultimate MILF,” said one friend (’scuse his vocab).

“She’s like the housewife waiting for the pizza delivery man,” said another. ‘And then they, you know . . .’

“She takes off her glasses and unpins her chignon,” said yet another man, prefacing a baroque scenario that is not suitable for a family newspaper.

Nothing to do with her shooting moose, then? Nope: the attraction is basic and physical.

“Hate her politics,” said a friend, “but she’s the sexiest woman I’ve seen in a long time.”

Don’t you find her voice incredibly grating, I asked. “We wouldn’t be chatting,” he replied.

Aren’t men strange? Women think they want cleavage and heels, but actually what they want is tightly buttoned up, completely square, but with a hint of promise glinting behind the specs.

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