“Consumer gloom as spending power fails,” said the front-page headline in Tuesday's Times. To which I can only say, tell me about it. Here, in no particular order, is a list of things I can't afford to do, this week, this month, this year.

I can't afford to have the car serviced; I can't afford to take the cat to the vet after his latest skirmish with the feline bully who thinks our garden is his territory. I can't afford to fix the rotten back door, even though it fell off a while ago and now maintains a tenuous attachment to its frame. Nor have I the means to staunch the leak that means when it's raining outside, it rains indoors as well. I can't even think about replacing the roof, in which there is a perceptible dip. I can't afford to get my cataracts treated privately, even though my GP briskly assured me that this was the only way to get them dealt with in the foreseeable future. I can't afford a holiday this year, and I certainly can't afford that treasured female ritual of a shopping expedition for a new spring wardrobe.

When I say I “can't afford” these things it is, of course, a relative sort of not being able to afford. Financially speaking, March is a particularly cruel month, with January's tax bill and February's VAT and accountant's bills falling like blows of fate, one after another. And although the current account is worse than empty, I do have a credit card with the usual vast credit limit and a modest outstanding balance. I dare say that the vet, the garage, the travel agent, the clothes shops and possibly even the builder and eye hospital would be happy to accept my flexible friend.

What's more, having bought a small, cheap house a long time ago, and steadily overpaid on the mortgage, I have a comparatively modest outstanding balance there, too. Even in the midst of the credit crunch I suppose I might find a lender willing to release some of the equity in my decrepit but much-more- valuable-than-when-I-bought-it house. And then I could bung on a new roof and a solid back door, no problem. So what's stopping me? Why am I sitting here in my ancient jeans and Oxfam jumper, peering at the computer screen through a cataract fog, typing away to the merry plink of raindrops into a bucket and planning to pin down the cat as soon as I've finished and bathe his wounds with salt water, when I could sort out my ramshackle life with a phone call or two to the mortgage broker? Because I'm frightened, that's why.

In Wednesday's Budget speech the Chancellor used the reassuring word “stability” 23 times. But stability is exactly what I don't feel I have. This time last year it struck me that, having been accustomed for years to finding a small surplus in my account at the end of the month I was now barely breaking even. With the help of a financial adviser I reviewed my budget. The results were chilling. So I began a regime of economies. Like many of the respondents to the Times Online poll, reported on Tuesday, I stopped eating out and buying books or clothes, except in sales or charity shops, began scrutinising the cost of my food, replacing Elizabeth David's French Country Cooking with Susan Campbell's Poor Cook.

A year later it is clear that these gestures - the elimination from our spending of all frivolity, the stern crushing of any extravagant impulse - are nothing like enough. Not only do I not feel a sense of stability, I feel as though financial freefall is a heartbeat away, with the fact that we are not enormously in debt our only fragile safety net. Which is why I hesitate to borrow to get the cat or the roof fixed; and also why I have belatedly realised that things aren't going to get better, and that I have to embark on a radical rethink of my relationship with money.

A headline in another of the week's papers reads, “Treasury wants to take the shame out of bankruptcy”, which struck me as odd because, although I hope I'm not on the verge of bankruptcy, I have a certain sense of shame about my situation. When I bought my first flat, in my late twenties, my parents gave me the deposit. It seems unlikely that I'll be able to do the same for my son - more likely he will begin his working life with the equivalent of that deposit in student debt and no prospect of buying a place of his own until I do the decent thing and leave him what remains of my estate (after inheritance tax).

To which you might say (as Ed Balls either did or didn't during the Budget debate, depending on whom you believe): “So what?” That's what social mobility is all about: the feeble going to the wall while the vigorous rise to take their place. If that is how it works, I can hardly complain, though I'm not proud to be the generation that undoes the remarkable achievement of my foundling grandfather, who dragged himself from destitution into the middle class by sheer hard work and determination.

But I wonder what will happen now that the erstwhile middle class is subsisting on a regime of tight belts, leaky roofs, old cars and no holidays. To some of us the adjustment, after the initial shock, is not without its charm: I've always liked growing things and making do; never really enjoyed going on holiday; can, now I've readjusted my expectations, still live a life of modest happiness within the constraints of my dramatically reduced spending power. But if there is a whole class of people out there who share my experience (and the Times Online poll suggests there is), what will happen to the gap in the economy that our money used to fill? While I wait for my clever colleagues on the Comment pages to answer that question, I am consoling myself with an ancient copy of World of Interiors, in which a young man of no means but exquisite sensibility invited the magazine to photograph his lovely home - a squat in a tumble-down North London stables where visitors navigated the ruined floor and leaky roof to sit on rickety reclaimed chairs among a riot of ravishing objets trouvés. I may be on the way down, but I'm going there in style.

Haute cuisine versus kitchen Cabinet
Eleven years ago, provoked by a picture of the Blair Babes clustered around the new Prime Minister, I wrote an article lamenting their ghastly clothes. It caused a flurry of condemnation - not of the dowdies, but of me, for being so frivolous as to think it mattered what a female MP wore. I was reminded of that piece this week by two contrasting gatherings. In France, female Ministers attended an official dinner at the Élysée palace. Their British counterparts, meanwhile, were photographed on their way to a Cabinet meeting. The French politicians are women of a certain age, with medium good looks and figures. The Brits ditto - though Yvette Cooper, Caroline Flint and Ruth Kelly are younger than their French colleagues. But what a difference of presentation: the French well groomed, beautifully dressed, feminine without being unsuitably provocative (unlike the President's ex-model wife, in a nasty one-shouldered purple frock). The Brits, on the other hand, look a mess: Yvette Cooper in a crumpled suit with unsuitable knee boots; Caroline Flint in a dire, split skirt and low-cut waistcoat; Ruth Kelly apparently wearing an outfit borrowed from someone twice her size and age. To me, elegance is a matter of self-control. When I look at Rachida Dati, or Condoleezza Rice, their exquisite grooming seems part of the seriousness with which they are tackling their important jobs. How odd that in Britain, with our vibrant fashion industry, female MPs should consider turnout a matter of no importance.

Fare trade
A survey by Tesco finds that traditional British dishes are being replaced by foreign cuisine. Sherry trifle and coronation chicken, it is claimed, might disappear from our dining tables by 2021. To which the only possible reaction from anyone who has ever tasted either of these repulsive confections has to be - as late as that?

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