We’ve had an extraordinary week here in deepest rural France. Two close chums arrived last Monday – one an artist’s agent, the other a writer. We lay about variously dodging showers, eating far too much and emptying the booze fridge, and when it got too hot, we wandered back to the cool salle sejour to stare at various screens – Ipad, netbook, Mac and telly – and watch the end of an epoch in history.

Totally removed from (and yet somehow part of) this raining down of the firestones upon Sodom and Gomorrah, it gave the week an eerie atmosphere. Like the sign-off to a short story about depravity (it probably saved Piers Morgan’s skin, at least temporarily) the growing impatience of markets in Europe – and childish behaviour in Washington – seemed to move almost precisely in parallel, like a form of synchronised fiscal and economic sinking. Italy, Spain, and the obviously half-baked US debt deal were in turn almost overtaken by the speed with which panic selling began in London, followed swiftly by New York – and then Asia.

The picador’s sword –  S&P’s downgrading of America’s credit rating – probably came  too late in the day to affect much (almost certainly by design) and then, as always seems to happen with these regular crises in the last years of free-market bollocks, it was the weekend: thus giving time for those at the wheel of the runaway train to ponder their next move. I personally doubt if there will be much market response to the S&P downgrade when the asylum opens for business again later tonight; but I would be very surprised if the EU situation isn’t a total mess by the end of the week. Apart from anything else, the G7 are now involved, so things can only get more mendacious, devious, confusing and altogether much worse. Add to that the Mad Woman of Chaillot in charge of the IMF, and this time we really do have the full set.

This forced all of us (we were joined by two more folks on Friday) to behave in a manner that must’ve resembled Hitler’s bunker in the hours before they barbecued the Great Man. As most of our quaffing plonk these days comes out of box-packaged plastic sacks, by this morning the fridge had a vaguely medical air, being full of what looked like colostomy bags – the residue of boozers keen not to waste a single drop.

Still, today it’s been lovely. Just a hint of autumn (this whole, disastrous year has had the feeling from January 1st of wanting to get itself over with as quickly as possible) and soft sunlight come seven pm. Tomorrow the guests leave, and I’ll be on the blower to my ‘wealth’ managers for a pow-wow about what to do as each stage of meltdown leads inexorably towards the China syndrome.

The Chinese reaction to America’s credit-rating disgrace deserves some study, and I urge you to look at the China Daily Oped in full. It does not bode well for a peaceful world in the immediate future, as this extract shows: ‘The U.S. government has to come to terms with the painful fact that the good old days when it could just borrow its way out of messes of its own making are finally gone. China, the largest creditor of the world’s sole superpower, has every right now to demand the United States to address its structural debt problems and ensure the safety of China’s dollar assets.’

Or put another way, we have you by the balls round-eyes, so watch out.

Anyway, the scene is now set. We have a British Watergate, a fiscal meltdown, an economic slump, and the implosion of our biggest trading partner all in the same place at the same time – here and now.

I wish you all luck: we are all going to need it.