Is that an iceberg ahead? Make mine a jereboam and put it on my credit card

First there was the news of passengers rescued from lifeboats in Antarctica as their cruise ship went down after hitting an iceberg. Then Tim Price, our guest Investment columnist this week, reminded me of ex-Citigroup chief Chuck Prince’s observation about dancing as long as the music keeps playing. Then at a wedding on Saturday, a Welsh male voice choir sang the Celine Dion hit My Heart Will Go On: a charming sentiment, I agree, but also the theme song from a certain epic disaster film — and you must have guessed by now which way my thoughts have been moving. As I stagger from one glittering pre-Christmas social event to the next, I can’t help wondering whether we’re all now dancing in the first-class saloon of the Titanic.

The lookouts can hear the ice floes fracturing — but they can’t yet tell how close is the danger. The Council of Mortgage Lenders says repossessions will rise by 50 per cent next year to a level not seen since the mid-Nineties; a business survey says 35 per cent of companies expect to experience tougher credit conditions some time soon. Disaster looms in the dark, yet on every deck the party goes on. You want a leather sofa on four years’ ‘interest-free’ credit? It’s yours today. You want a used car with ‘Nothing to Pay in 2008’? Drive it away. You want a magnum of Bollinger — on your credit card, of course? Well, you can’t have one, because according to Berry Bros & Rudd, the St James’s vintners, demand for champagne is so outstripping supply, particularly in ostentatious larger bottles, that ‘rationing’ may have to be introduced.

It was at the most ostentatious of my own recent outings — a fundraiser in the staterooms of that nice little palace just down the road from Berry Bros — that a captain of industry offered me the following theory.