Like milk on the doorstep or a good new Woody Allen film, an old fashioned run on a bank was something you thought you’d never see again.

So your correspondent, back in the UK for no more than 36 hours, couldn’t resist a trip to the Moorgate branch of Northern Rock, the former building society – now classed as a generic “mortgage lender” – which has lost half its value in a week (and 80% in the last six months – £5.5bn down to £1.1bn), following the release of news that the Bank of England had bailed it out of a cash crisis.

Moorgate, near the heart of the City, was said to have the biggest queue and your Marxist economic disaster tourist was not disappointed. It went for blocks and blocks and blocks, a thing in itself like a Britart exhibit.

Later it was reported that people had queued for five hours, and many never made it in to the branch.

Those I spoke to were pretty calm, but also determined to get their money out, even if they had to take it away in a sack. But one thing above all was noticeable – it was largely an older crowd. That’s not just because NR specialises in mortgages, I suspect – it’s because many younger people have lived so long in an economy without major reversal that the concept of actual loss or disaster hasn’t really registered.

Only those closer by a generation to the great depression or the credit squeezes of the 50s and 60s still have that possibility in their heads.

The crisis is as good a snapshot of capitalism’s emerging credit crisis as you could get. NR was once, as the name suggests, a building society (actually two), founded on the idea of mutual lending – ie. it was the reverse of an open line of credit, because borrowers, lenders and proprietors were responsible for each other’s welfare.

When the institution was demutualised and floated, the principle was exactly reversed – it only survived by taking on borrowers the bigger banks wouldn’t lend to, an exact contradiction of the values it was founded on.

The obvious impasse for capital at this historical moment is that responsible lending would slow the economy to the point where its engine would stall, but the current extension of credit is simply disguised inflation, largely bound up in house prices – and has the same corrosive effect on confidence as more visible forms do.

An interesting problem to study dispassionately, if you were watching it happen from Mars. But we appear to be inside the bomb.

Doesn’t matter to me though. I’m with a bank that’s a byword for safety.

Lloyds.

Doh.