It has got to the point where I have investigated so many avenues in search of a new job that things have begun to blur – the search needs to be reprioritised and given a renewed discipline. I need to shake the etch-a-sketch in my head and start with a clean slate, ready to move forward and out of the rut that has begun to form.

Ironically, this week has been the most positive period since I was made redundant. It included a number of interviews and calls for second interviews, plus some movement on leads that I thought had gone cold. It may seem very stupid to step away from the process at this time, just as things are beginning to heat up.

However, three and a bit months at home have begun to produce a definite bout of cabin fever. Obviously, there have been weekends away and days out, but I feel I need to step out of the process for a week and take in a different view. So next week the whole family is leaving the hustle and bustle of London and heading for the countryside.

Quite frankly, I would just like to disappear for seven days without access to the internet or the newspapers: every time I walk past a news-stand it seems to have some fresh financial disaster plastered across it in large letters. After 15 months of credit crunch related doom and gloom, I would like to look away for a moment and forget the state of the banking industry.

Everyone, it seems, lays the blame for the current turmoil fairly and squarely at the feet of the banks and the overpaid and irresponsible bankers who made hay while the sun shone. I am fed up with constantly being told by people from outside banking and so-called experts in the press that the greed of bankers lies behind this entire mess.

I am not saying that greed wasn’t a factor in our current sorry state of affairs, but greed was far more widespread than in the City or on Wall Street alone. What exactly do the people who believed that it was feasible for house prices to rise 15% a year in perpetuity and who therefore borrowed exorbitant amounts of money, sometimes fraudulently, think they were motivated by?

The entire system was based on the idea that in terms of asset values the only way was up and the more you borrowed the more you would make.

Now, as we continue to see the consequences of this enormous greed-fest unwinding, those who borrowed to join in the game stand beside their 'For sale' signs vilifying those who leant them the money. They are no more innocent than the overpaid bankers who were left holding the toxic waste when the music stopped.