All these foreign phrases. All over the papers. All to do with the recession, depression, catastrophe – or whatever the next one up from that is.

An economic Pearl Harbour, one analyst called the current uncertainties – although it's probably unwise to bandy about war rhetoric while Bush still has his finger on the button.

Whatever. Safe to say, these are bad times. It's all job cuts, bank prop-ups and plummeting bucks.

Stocks and shares are in the kind of freefall you normally associate with Halifax Town FC. They're going down and, for the foreseeable future, that's where they're staying.

Sell, sell, sell, they're screaming in the city and on Wall Street.
And some thought – long hidden in the collateral damage of my memory – raised its snout…

What I know about economics is just enough to know I know nothing at all. It's one of those subjects – like the Big Bang or why people watch EastEnders – which is simply beyond my comprehension. My head won't go round it.

I'm just intelligent enough to know how truly unintelligent I am, I suppose.

But this thought – creeping in from school days studying the Great Depression – wouldn't leave me: "When the headlines say sell, it's time to buy."

And so, in a moment of whimsy or bravery or stupidity, I put my money where my mouth is. And I bought, bought, bought.

When capitalism is awash with fear, I reasoned, there is nothing to be afraid of.

I became a shareholder. Me. A Master of the Universe, you might say. Although, frankly, if we're talking The Bonfire Of The Vanities, the Tom Wolfe novel where the phrase comes from, I'm probably less bond trader Sherman McCoy, more Peter Fallow, the journalist with the comb-over.

But there it is.

The credit crunch can get bent. My entire adulthood has been one long credit crunch anyway.

But the meagre sums I've saved from cutting down on non-essentials (heating, furniture, that kind of thing) have now been plunged into the stock market.

I spent some time studying the FTSE, analysing different companies, waiting for, what experts call, the moment of Maximum Pessimism – that is, the point when things look so desperate you'd have to be totally insane or utterly astute to invest. And I dived in.

I found some shares that had dropped from 327p at the start of the year to 162.5p. And, with fingers crossed that the company could survive the worst of the downturn and bounce back stronger, I invested.

Are you sure? they asked.

And I was. I'd only waste the money anyway by eventually putting it towards a house or something equally useless.

Now I sit back and wait five years for my dollar to double.
Bears and bulls? Piece of cake. So I hope.