The whingeing wealthy have never had it so good

Except, oddly, I'm not. I may not feel well off, but that's more to do with how many free hours I have than what's left in my bank account after the taxman and the Alliance & Leicester have done their worst. But I am getting sick of those who bemoan the financial fate of people like me - earning more than my whole family put together and sitting very comfortably, thank you.

This new "coping class", or the whingeing wealthy, as I prefer to call us, complain about having to curb pricey foreign holidays and meals out. Yet we also spend so much in Waitrose each week that we toss out 30 per cent of our food.

How short our memories are. My parents took us on one foreign holiday in my entire childhood. As for eating out, it only happened on high days and holidays. Shopping was based on a list of meals and paid for with carefully counted-out coins.

There are lots of people like me, brought up in modest circumstances but doing well thanks to a good education and - in my case - the gender revolution. Why don't we know how lucky we are?

Perhaps because in London we all feel the pinch a bit more. We pay more in tax, mortgages and cost of living. And there is the curse of aspiration. We live in a city where multibillionaires aren't uncommon and property prices have been artificially inflated by people who can buy houses for millions of pounds - in cash. Nightclubs bustle with the most envied group of all, the nonworking wealthy, living off interest and trust funds.

It's delusional, yet so many of us ignore the logic that tells us we can never achieve the equivalent of inherited riches. Instead we think it's our right to have unfettered access to private schooling, two cars in the driveway and plasma-screen TVs. We actually think these things are basics, not the unimaginable luxuries they were to our parents. And then we whinge if something like an economic downturn threatens our God-given right to have them.

But I walked into this situation with my eyes open. My mortgage looks dodgy because I did what I had to do last year, when the property market was crazy - I took out a 30-year mortgage at four-and-a-half times my salary. I knew the day of reckoning was around the corner. If I have to cancel my gym membership to keep up the payments, so be it.

We live in profligate times, gorging ourselves on consumer durables and Michelin-starred food. We need to wake up to the fact that we are not hard done by.