It is just after midsummer here, the best time of year, when we are suddenly all happy to be English in a green and sun-bathed country. I went to bed in almost light last night. Predictably the reality, while nature continues to give her best show in the face of high winds and rainfall, is a lot less golden. Our finances are in a mess, inflation at an 11-year high of 3.3 per cent with ever-rising fuel prices and falling house prices that leave the poorest unable to use their cars, or their heating come the winter, and an increasingly skewed financial balance that makes house ownership even more out of their reach. I see that India’s inflation rate has hit a 13-year high of 11 per cent, so perhaps we should be thankful for small mercies.

Our government is riding this storm like the grim horsemen of the apocalypse, the gloom seeming to suit the prime minister with his face as grey and lumpen as a sack of coal and, in his shadow and his pocket, the increasingly featureless chancellor of the exchequer, Alistair Darling. In his traditional yearly speech at the mayor of London’s residence, the Mansion House, the chancellor called for public and private wage restraint, which can hardly be seen as positive government policy to get us out of our current hole. Meanwhile, the governor of the Bank of England, Mervyn King, prophesied further rises in fuel and electricity costs at the same time as squeezed wage packets all round. The rich, of course, may think of keeping their larger cars in their garages for a while and settling for a hyper cool Fiat 500 in town, but the less affluent are forced back to a public transport system, which is little less expensive and doesn’t work. If it did, many of us would use it more regularly in preference to sitting in traffic jams.

We are all being urged to get on our bikes like the new mayor of London and the leader of the opposition, his car carries his political papers apparently. I am all for bikes in London and other big cities, where distances are relatively small and traffic clogging the issue, although I find angry city traffic terrifying. Few people have time these days, where life happens before you catch up, to cycle along long country roads, where public transport is sparse to non-existent, and the choice of the bike or the car to get to work in the neighbouring town in the pouring rain is no choice at all until fuel prices bring us all to a total standstill. Our governments have always taxed and never subsidized fuel even for the poor, aside from the feeble extra fuel allowance for pensioners in the winter. The Indian view that a fuel subsidy is the best way to give support to the poor cuts no ice here where we speak endlessly of poverty but don’t really believe in it. A local social worker in the prosperous local market town told me last week that she knew of families living there with hungry children — cold children too, I should imagine.

Being greener for a low-carbon economy in keeping with poorly expressed government hopes and a more positive message from the opposition Conservatives may be forced upon us when most of us can no longer afford fuel by any means, but we need a strategy that at least makes greenness cost available. Currently, like the organic food meant to be so much better for us and our environment, green energy has a premium, at least in capital costs, and few of us have been able to become green enough in our ordinary lives to see the benefits in cost or climate change. A report by Nicholas Stern in 2006 warned that global warming could shrink the global economy by 20 per cent, an unhappy thought on top of the current downturn. He concluded that “the costs of action — reducing greenhouse gas emissions to avoid the worst impacts of climate change — can be limited to around 1% of GDP each year”. Happy thought, but we need leadership to become green and the pill needs to be sugared for us all to swallow even when faced with the additional compulsion of prohibitive fuel costs.

The British businessman and academic, Lord Turner of Ecchinswell, better known as Adair Turner, was appointed at the beginning of this year to head the government committee on climate change and has attacked the post with some vigour, announcing his belief in an achievable target of a 60 per cent drop in national carbon emissions and his hope for as much as 90 per cent by 2050. But most of us, including the government, remain rather vague about how this will happen, not liking the sound of the ‘changes in lifestyle’ and ‘energy-efficient households’ involved, whatever the eventual benefit to our pockets and our climate. We need absolute clarity from our leaders and the building of a national consciousness of a mutual enemy that we can defeat with united effort. Tiresome and cost-cutting measures on rubbish collection by local government, mostly rubbish that arrives as part and parcel of the modern supermarket food trade, make us all the more determined to eat, drink and be merry for tomorrow we are broke in a burnt-up wasteland.

Plenty of fiddling while Rome burns on show at this party time of year in an atmosphere of the last years of decadence. Very depressing it is too. No style, just drunken teenagers knifing one another at street corners, celebrity scandals and the old-fashioned class act of events like Royal Ascot this week, upheld only by the Queen and those few old hands who still dress in a very English fashion to get past the stewards in the Royal Enclosure. Ascot week has some of the best racing in the English horse-racing calendar and once upon a time looked beautiful too. Cecil Beaton’s design for the Ascot scene in My Fair Lady may have over-egged the pudding with the elegance of his black and white theme but even in my youth, Ascot was still an event to dress for properly. I think the actress Joan Collins was one of the earliest women to be forced to change her skirt for a more modest hemline; these days stewards have been forced to issue further directives on the covering of shoulders and tops and even the necessity of underwear.

Hats, too, are in trouble with the vogue for bunches of fluff and feathers, known as fascinators, attached by pins and grips to some part of the head and less fascinating on most women than you could possibly imagine. Outside the well-stewarded Royal Enclosure, where you still have to apply to Her Majesty’s Representative at Ascot and be seconded by known others in order to receive the vouchers needed to gain tickets, the worst of fashion and behaviour runs riot on the basis of any excuse for a party. The papers are full of pictures that would make my grandfather, a former chairman of the Jockey Club and scion of the Jockey Club box at Ascot, turn in his grave, as fleets of young women with fake tans take off as many clothes as possible to party, party, party. It has to be said that these are not the idle rich but hard-working young women and young men whose idea of a good time this is. Perhaps it was ever thus, but I think it looked better once upon a time.

So here we are, running as fast as we can into the ground, possibilities for an upward path so ill-defined and leadership so lacking that we seem to be giving up altogether. I would rather sit at home being grumpy than join the heaving mass of bodies at the great events of the English season. But we are invited to a rash of midsummer weddings in the next weeks, where I will be covering as much of myself as possible in beautiful Indian designs, neatly avoiding the need for a fascinator, and hoping to party equally modestly, if enough to forget descending despondency. I’m thinking of forswearing the demon drink altogether but as the young demonstrate, it does make the vicissitudes of life and the economy a little easier to take.