So, I no longer have a credit card.

It wasn't exactly my choice, I must admit. But after my nth call to Barclaycard to request a lower rate than the 24.9 per cent APR I was paying, and their nth refusal to change it, I cancelled it altogether. 

I am furious, so forgive the following rant because I am absolutely blue with fury. 

What, exactly, does Barclaycard consider to be a good customer? One who has been a client for 25 years? One who owns her house outright and her car outright? Who has no loans or mortgages? Who periodically pays off her balance entirely, always pays off the minimum each month and who pays by direct debit so she can never miss a payment?

And yet they couldn't wait to get rid of me. To say that I am beside myself with rage would be an understatement.

The issue is that, clearly, I don't fit into one of their little pigeonholes, so I am no use to them. I don't have a monthly salary, being freelance, and I don't have high outgoings. That is the kind of client the banks really want, so they can pull you in, fling you over a barrel and keep you there indefinitely. They are scumbags. No wonder the world economy is in such a mess. Over the years I've gotten well sick of banks phoning me up trying to get me to take out a loan, or a mortgage, or a remortgage for an extension I don't need or a car I don't want.  

Back in the UK I have a friend, C, who with her partner runs an electrical goods shop, selling televisions etc. She has been amazed these past 10 years at the people who are buying the equipment - unemployed people, people on income support, people from the local council estate. The Waynes and Waynettas of the kingdom, or what we British call 'Chavs'.

"It's all on tick (credit) Trish," she told me, gobsmacked. "You know - WE can't afford these things, these plasma-screen TVs and stuff - we just have an old colour telly. But all these people have credit cards and they come in here and they drop thousands..."

Myself and C, who was a nursing matron for many years, come from the same kind of background. Our parents weren't wealthy. They were modest, hard-working people (we too lived on the council estate), but in those days credit - 'the tick' - was frowned upon.

My parents regarded it as little better than the pawnshop and what we couldn't afford to buy, including our television, we rented. We bought almost nothing new - not cars, not furniture, not even clothes. "If you can't buy it from your savings, then you can't afford it," was their mantra, and over the years I have come to agree with them.

The truth is that the credit card exists to fill the gap between the person you are and the person you'd like to be - and God help you if that gap is too wide. 

Time was when, blithe about my employment prospects, I'd run up large amounts on the credit card (though never more than a couple of grand) and just for things I wanted, rather than needed. But over the years I noticed the APR getting higher and I switched to using the card only for overseas purchases where I couldn't use a debit card (Paypal, Amazon.com etc). But this is not the kind of client the credit companies want - the careful, organised shopper. They are simply not making enough money out of me.

So, now that credit stream is closed to me, and it looks like I won't be buying from overseas any more (though luckily I can use a debit card on Amazon.co.uk).

Oh la. If that's the way they want it. No-one has a right to credit, but all I wanted was a reasonable rate - the kind of rate that they offer their new customers. And if they can't offer me that, then screw them - I'll manage without.  

A friend popped round to see me the other day. She's one of those people who comes and goes with the season, she and her husband spending some of their time in Britain, some in France and some - though increasingly little, what with petrol prices the way they are - at their house in Spain.

Despite having been solidly middle class most of their lives, in retirement they are feeling the pinch. And the sign? She's buying a clothes horse. 

Oddly enough, I'd had the self-same conversation with my sister only hours earlier. She too was looking for a clothes horse - evidently something of a rare beast now in the UK, where people are expected to use tumble dryers. Since clothes horses are ubiquitous in my neck of the woods, where virtually no-one owns a tumble dryer, I advised her to wait until she visits me next month and take one home with her.

It is the size of their last electricity bill that has inspired both of these women to stop using the tumble dryer, as I myself did two years ago after a whopping 500 euro bill. "I bet 200 of that is the tumble dryer," I said, and so it proved to be. A shame, because I did, and do, like the softness that tumble drying gives to your clothes and the ease of washing the bedding, drying it and getting it back on the bed in a single day.

However, as we all know, tumble dryers are the children of Satan. They are bad for the planet - I got no sympathy from friends when I gave mine up, as they'd thought me a decadent cow for having one at all. They consume a vast amount of electricity and they also destroy your clothes - just look at what's in the lint trap: that's your clothes disintegrating. My clothes now show far less damage for NOT being tumble dried (and interestingly, in cotton things, less shrinkage too). 

An American friend, Linda, would be horrified. She can't get over the way the French hang their washing OUTSIDE on lines to dry, where people can SEE it - to her, a sign of complete hillbillydom. Well, I guess that's a cultural thing - she's probably changing her tune now that the bills are rocketing. 

I dry my clothes on two flat dryers that open out like big ironing boards and which are great for reblocking sweaters etc (I don't have a washing line outside). In summer, they just stand outside the door, hopefully in the sun, while in winter I have a different routine. I put a washload on when we light the woodburner each evening, then just before we go to bed, I empty the washer and put the clothes out on the rack to dry overnight in front of the stove. That way, you use up the excess heat and you don't have wet washing cluttering up the house during the day.  

The smell of it is comforting somehow - I grew up in a house with only a coal stove and no central heating, so it's the smell of childhood, I guess. And at least I have the satisfaction of single-handedly saving the planet. 

Watch out for an article on economising later in the week. 

I did the second shop of the week yesterday, and frankly it was painful. Since we downshifted to France, money's always been tight - not allowing much leeway for clothes, or books or holidays etc, but at least we've always been able to eat well. Now, with work fast disappearing into the ether and the strong Euro making our UK earnings sink to a pittance, we're also being hit by the third whammy of food pricing.

A couple months ago, I could do the weekly shop pretty easily for 100 euros, doing the main shop at Lidl and the top-up at SuperU. I struggled to get it down to 75 if we were in a cashflow rut. But now, it's a struggle to get it below 120 euros and if I turn my back for a second, it's up to 130 or 140.

What the hell is happening to prices? Surely there's not less food in the world than there was in January. And there can't be THAT many more people than two months ago. I know the oil price is savage, but I can't help thinking that in this case, the supermarkets are also loading the price and taking advantage. And I buy mostly locally produced goods such as meat and vegetables - it's not as if they're having to come very far. We don't buy rice or anything exotic.

OK, I count my blessings here, because at least we live in the West, and there's a welfare state and with the worst will in the world, we're not about to starve to death like people in Haiti very well might. But I will admit that it is getting very tedious, constantly shopping for the cheapest cider, the cheapest orange juice, the cheapest cuts of meat, and trying to string together something reasonable out of it.

A caisse de porc, which is a big pack of mixed pork cuts, cost 2.30 euros a kilo three weeks ago, but yesterday it was 4.00. Instead I bought a pack of even cheaper cuts for 2.80 a kilo, which turned out to be massives lumps of pork shoulder. They looked like one of Christopher Moltisanti's victims, laid out in the kitchen, but thankfully Elizabeth David came to the rescue with cooking methods and we ate porc a la style provencale, with white wine and thyme (it was delicious, btw).

The thing is, how much pork can one family reasonably be expected to eat in a week? This is a meat I used to avoid altogether, but with most other meats coming in above 8 euros per kilo, and fish even worse, pork is suddenly looking a lot more attractive. And the DH is most definitely a meat-eater - middle-class vegetarianism is not an option.

Oh well, since there is nothing we can do about it, we must just get on with it. But I am alone in being pissed at John Paulson? And at George Soros - these people who push money around the world and actually contribute fuck all? We pay about 50 per cent tax on our earnings, while they pay about 15 per cent, and they earned nearly $2 billion between them last year. Wonder how much pork I could buy with that?