The crunch has freed us from those bags of bling

So now it's official - it's us and them. While most of us are contemplating our bills with a sinking heart, the super-rich have been barely affected. Yet.

Burberry specifically boasts of selling "several hundreds" of its Warrior ladies handbag since January. At £13,000 a go, the Warrior is about a foot long and is made out of gold-painted alligator hide. To the disinterested eye, it's a slumpy looking thing, a bit banana-shaped. It might seem the most perfectly useless item ever devised, but not so.

Nothing is more healthy and enjoyable than eyeing up very expensive things that you know you don't want. Many people, I think, are starting to feel like this about plenty of other until lately much-craved status markers, too - ridiculously overpowered and oversized cars, absurd "grazing menus" at overpriced restaurants, ostentatious long-haul weekend breaks, designer furniture such as the bespoke Swedish bed that costs up to £30,000. Even if they do not yet feel actually repulsed, they know they no longer crave such extravagances. And that's a liberation.

For most of the past decade, there was a continuum of aspiration and consumption, from top to bottom, so that, for example, those who yearned for the alluring but unattainable gold-plated Warrior would keenly buy another bag, perhaps even the "entry level" Warrior at a mere £1,195.

Handbag sales have soared over the past five years - and even those women unable to afford even the very humblest Warrior have still been up for spending an average of £380 per silly bag. We were all caught up in one great folly.

That's all over now, or so I hope, so I trust. This week's shock houseprice figures have shown the fastest fall ever, perhaps now into double figures for this year and next. All of us who have been happily spending away on consumer trophies - knowing that however much we carelessly splashed out, our houses would see us right, ceaselessly working away night and day to build up our net worth - now have to think again. And that's before the crushing fuel bills that await us have truly kicked in. And while most of us still have our jobs.

The international super-rich, whose wealth transcends not only questions of income but even of property, may remain more or less unaffected. But now they're starting to look like another species entirely: not a friendly one, not one to copy.

The rest of us are at last starting to realise that we're entering another world. It's going to be a long haul this time - and The Warrior and its like won't be coming with us.