Early next year, my body will be taken to a hillside, my broken bones to be pecked clean by vultures. I will have spent my last few months racked with shame, in a cold sweat of fear.

The words 'If only those Christmas fairy lights had been designed to last more than one season' will repeat in my brain like a mantra, mocking my profligacy.

The reason my way of life, like that of an indigenous Amazonian Indian, will be at a brutal end? Like more than a million other British homeowners, my two-year fixed-rate mortgage will expire, and I will be thrown on the mercy of market forces.

Even the news that the Monetary Policy Committee has cut a quarter of a per cent off the base rate has failed to bring cheer.

What is that equivalent to? Two lattes, half a litre of petrol? No.

It is all doom. Doom! How could I have been so greedy, so wantonly optimistic? Let me explain that I am a member of that shameful breed, the source of all the planet's problems: my name is Liz Jones, and I am a sub-prime borrower.

Don't blame the greedy banks, or 9/11, or war, or Gordon Brown, or City bonuses, or people who live in Monte Carlo, or supermarket price fixers, or buy-to-let landlords. Blame me.

How did I end up in my sordid cul-de-sac from a normal world of people who open their bank statements rather than stuff them in a drawer? A few years ago, I missed making a minimum payment on a credit-card debt, an amount of about £25.

That pushed me into a downward white-knuckle whorl of having to borrow from those hideous daytime TV people, who then proceeded to intimidate me almost daily.

Where was the Treasury when I was going through my own personal hell? In order to get a mortgage two years ago, I had to pay £10,000 to Savills Private Finance to secure it, and endure the life sentence of a higher rate of interest, which means I can only afford to pay the interest of my huge debt.

To build myself some sort of secure future, I then did what I was told by my financial adviser, and invested a huge sum each month in a portfolio of ethical businesses.

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