My husband and I decide to go and see the latest Woody Allen; as couples do, we have supper before the movie in a noodle bar. At the end of the meal we realise that between us we have no cash, and so have to pay with a credit card.

“I’ve brought all the cards,” says my husband cheerfully, riffling through about nine pieces of plastic. “Trouble is, I can’t remember which ones are up to their limit.”

Go to a cash machine? Forget it. Both our current accounts have been frozen. Welcome to the world of middle-class debt.

Last week it was announced there are more credit cards than people in the UK (67m, to be precise), and that personal debt is so huge Britain is more indebted than Argentina. If interest rates go up, the experts warn, the effect on ordinary people could be like a “time bomb”. Credit card debt accounts for £2 billion and Britain has in total a £1 trillion debt mountain.

In our case, the time bomb has just exploded. On paper, my husband and I are what is known in polite parlance as “comfortably off”. In reality, we have no money. Anything that comes into Chez Millard goes out pretty much immediately on debt repayment.

That, and paying the nanny so we can both go out to work and earn more money. For more debt repayment. An Impoverished Professional, I call myself. And there are plenty of us out there.

My voyage into debt started, as these things do, with an almost unnoticeable, but incremental, downward curve. After the wedding (paid for by my father), we bought a house. “Extend yourselves as much as you can,” advised our friends.

This seemed a great idea, particularly when house prices in Hackney started to rocket. So we bought a big house and signed up for an endowment policy.

A couple of years down the line, when we had two nippers in tow, the value of the house had gone up, a lot. We borrowed against the booming equity in our home and bought a couple of flats, which we let. Avid readers of The Sunday Times may know thus was created a penchant for buy to let, which can make you quite a nice income. On paper.

After we had finished charging around Ikea and furnishing two flats, we had another baby (and each extra child necessitates a pay rise to the nanny). It was at this point, I believe, that the great invention of the £10,000 interest-free card arrived.

Flyers advertising funkily desirable credit cards with amusing names such as Goldfish, Mint or Rainbow suddenly started dropping through the front door, flagging up the fabulous notion of six months’ interest-free cash. So we siphoned some of our overdrafts onto a card, or two. Actually, we signed up for four.

Of course, we are not alone: nearly everyone I know is playing the plastic game; a senior news editor at the BBC has so many cards — each bearing a £10,000 millstone — that he has actually achieved circularity and is having to now take them out in his wife’s name.

“We have completely reached our limit of debt and are awaiting money from remortgaging our house,” says Jessica, one of my girl friends. “The bank says we have ‘reached the end of our borrowing possibilities’.”