Rod Liddle Rod Liddle

The truth is that the house price crash is, overall, good news

Rod Liddle says that our pursuit of property as investment has been the most repulsive and soul-destroying aspect of contemporary British culture

issue 26 April 2008

If you take that excellent map showing negative equity ‘hot-spots’ produced by George Bridges for The Spectator a couple of weeks back, and overlay it across a map of cancer ‘hot-spots’ for the UK, you will find that those baleful dark areas, the bad places on each map, tally almost exactly. You might have expected as much: falling house prices cause cancer. Or maybe cancer causes house prices to fall — one of the two. Anyway, those areas where hundreds of tumours pop up like jack-in-the-boxes throughout your body while you are eating your breakfast are also the areas where your house is now worth less than a month’s chemotherapy. I’d move, if I were you, get the hell out. Head for somewhere like Devizes or Guildford where houses are still going up in price and nobody ever gets cancer.

I discovered this correlation while attempting to draw up a Map of General Abject Bloody Misery for this magazine; an outline of Britain shaded in dingy hues of brown and purple pinpointing the fecundity of malignant illness, financial ruin, date rape, vector-borne disease, sudden infant death syndrome, rats, speed cameras and myocardial infarction in your part of the world.

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