But most September days so far this year it hardly seems worth chewing through the leather straps to get out and about.

Alien to my sunny temperament as it is, that feeling is partly due to the weather. It's now raining again, there's a small but significant leak in a bathroom roof, the conservation-minded water butts are overflowing and I'm reminded of an Australian visitor who looked out on a morning like this and remarked: "Boy, what a pisser."

I couldn't put it better. And as everyone, particularly in the Borders and north of England knows, we have had many a day like it this year during an alleged summer which should now have become early, fresh, crisp, dry, apple-picking autumn.

So much so that the Border floods of 1948, long the benchmark for awful weather, have been superseded for many by the floods of 2008, while for farmers the disastrous harvests of 1985, 1968 and 1958 – we each had our favourite – have been overtaken at a canter by the boggy, soggy, heart-sinking miseries of 2008.

It's not only the weather. After body blows to the world's mortgage lenders, the world's banks are now going down like a row of dominoes with multi-billion-dollar debts. Until now I had agreed with that most lucid of economists JK Galbraith who wrote in The Affluent Society: "Concern over the problem will be marked by the fortitude with which we are able to contemplate the sorrows of others."

Say that again, JK. Why should I feel sorry for investment bank parasites on society, or their employees who counted annual bonuses in hundreds of thousands, drank champagne like water, bought ludicrously expensive properties and paid minions to walk their poodles?

Then I read a selection of expert commentators – more each day to see if the view gets any better or gives a glimmer of hope – to be told that the reluctance of, for example, the bank of Lehman Brothers to change its ways now means trouble ahead for all of us. My conclusion: salvage what you can from the wreckage of whatever your bank is and spend it now.

Ah, and the political news. I once believed, self-criticism and self-awareness my forte, that a working lifetime as journalist and farmer had only broadened my natural cynical streak and that I saw all things clearly.

Now, as Labour and leadership implode, I realise I was naive, gullible and whatever other term can be used – idiot springs to mind – to believe Gordon Brown would be a good Prime Minister.

Most of all I'm depressed that Tom Bower's biography of Mr Brown pinned him accurately on every character-flaw count. And to think I shouted at Bower. Not in person, of course. At the book. Just as I find myself shouting at the television, radio, morning and Sunday paper, the weather and the rabbit that has appeared in the garden in the past week. Given the weather and state of surviving crops I wish it joy. But give me just one September morning as I used to know them and the little furry sod had better watch out.