Great. I go on holiday, turn my back for a few weeks, come back and what has happened? The banks are on fire and we're at war with Iceland. As I type these words (on a Friday morning, fact fans), Sky News is zooming in on a screen full of red flashing numbers, apparently willing them to fall yet lower. The problem is a lack of confidence, they keep saying, cutting away every so often to show a big plunging downward arrow or a shot of a City trader holding his head in despair.

I'm a bit sick of that whole holding-his-head-in-despair schtick, to be honest. It's about time they tried something more spectacular. Surely it's time for a revival of that great cliche of the 1930s, the ruined City whizzkid hurling himself out of the window? The credit crunch high dive. Extra points if you manage to pull a backflip on the way down, or crack your jaw on a window cleaner's cradle somewhere around floor 35. The ultimate high score goes to the first one who manages to successfully update his Facebook status using an iPhone seconds before slamming into the pavement. "Danny is plummeting to his doom." Click here to tag him in a photo.

Is this the end of the world? If so, it's a bit more boring than I'd imagined. So far, it's been an invisible apocalypse. Poke your head out the window and there's little evidence of charred debris. Perhaps that's yet to come. Like I say, I'm writing this on Friday morning. By the time you read it, it'll be Monday. Maybe we're already bartering with coloured pebbles or fighting over water or something.

Still, there's no point in worrying. If we're going to be plunged into some kind of barbaric medieval dark age, I might as well be philosophical about it, because there's no way I'll survive more than a month. I'd be hopeless at fighting over basic resources and don't have any essential manual skills, such as the ability to hunt and skin rats. Perhaps I can learn the lute and become a minstrel, or perform bawdy jigs in exchange for pennies. Assuming there are any pennies. Hey, maybe just before all currency is finally declared worthless we'll get to experience the whole wheelbarrows-full-of-worthless-banknotes thing, like they did in Germany just before the war. That'd be a blast.

It all seems particularly bizarre, because just over a week ago I was in Las Vegas, as part of a US road trip I'm writing up for the Travel section. The casino put me up in an outrageous suite the size of a millionaire's bachelor pad. It had a pool table, a butler, and a shower in the lounge with a lapdancing pole in the middle of it. The windows looked out over the Las Vegas strip; specifically over the multimillion-dollar fountain show at the front of Bellagio. I visited a nightclub full of pricks who danced around tossing banknotes in the air, then returned to the suite, which alongside a pool table and a butler, also came equipped with about six gigantic, wall-mounted HD plasma TVs, every single one of which was screaming bad news about the economy. I felt like I was trapped inside a terrifying satirical sci-fi flick.

And it had to happen, obviously. For years, money was just appearing from nowhere, or so we were told. People bought houses and bragged about how the value kept zooming up, and up, and up. In fact they didn't seem to be houses at all, but magic coin-shitting machines. It was all a dream, a dream in which you bought a box and lived in it, and all the time it generated money like a cow generates farts. Great big stinking clouds of money. And none of it was real. And now it's gone. Your house is worth less than your shoes, and your shoes are now, in turn, worth less than your mouth and your arse. Yes, your most valuable possessions are now your mouth and your arse, and you're going to have to use both of them in all manner of previously unthinkable ways to make ends meet, to pay for that box, the box you live in, the one you mistook for an enchanted, unstoppable cash engine. I hope you've got a nice kitchen. Maybe that'll take your mind off things. And sell that Alessi smoothie maker while you're about it. You can't afford fruit any more. It's tap water at best from now on. It's good for you! Really, it is.

All of it was a dream. All that crap we bought, all the bottled water and Blu-Ray players and designer shoes and iPod Shuffles and patio heaters; all the jobs we had; all the catchphrases we memorised and the stupid things we thought. Everything we did for the past 10 years - none of it really felt real, did it? Time to snap out of it. Time to grow our own vegetables and learn hand-to-hand combat with staves. And time, perhaps, to really start living.