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. I haven’t finished it yet; but when I do you’ll be able to pin it to your wall and gaze at it on those few days — Christmas Day, general election polling days, football World Cup finals — when there isn’t a Map of Specific Misery in your morning newspaper explaining why you’re heading straight for the workhouse or the hospice.
The house price business has kept me greatly entertained these past few months, the grim chicken-licken prognoses from the bankers, now counting the cost of their own greed and naivety (and yet, remarkably, being repeatedly bailed out for it), the piteous whining from estate agents.
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