Morning:
8°c
Often I feel as if I reside at the epicentre of credit crunch hell. A helpful survey this week seemed to confirm my worst suspicions that middle-class families in certain areas of London have the biggest debts in the UK.
Alas, I live in Teddington, slap bang in between the first and third worst areas in the entire country - Richmond and Kingston. And I used to live in Putney, which takes second place. there is no escape. this survey by credit agency experian puts average borrowing per person in Richmond at £53,533.
In Putney and Kingston it's around £46,000. these figures are supposed to make us think the middle class is feeling the pinch - and that we're far worse off than those in Chester-le-Street, County Durham, for instance, whose average loan and HP debt comes in at £3,471, or the Milton Keynes average of £2,974, figures which are meant to seem infinitely manageable by comparison. then I read the small print.
The London averages are supposed to include mortgage debt. This cannot possibly be right. Or is it just me? I'm sorry but I laugh in the face of your £50,000. If I knew anyone with mortgage debt of about £50,000, I would have to kill them in a fit of jealousy. Or at the very least refuse to be friends with them. Or just ask them to lend me some money.
Having a £50,000 mortgage is not a cause for concern or stress. even a £100,000 mortgage between two is a cause for celebration - and one I personally do not expect to see in my lifetime. These levels of middle-class debt in Kingston, Richmond and Putney are not high: they are ridiculously low.
If they're remotely accurate it's because they include the tens of thousands of people who very sensibly bought property in the 1970s and 1980s and probably don't have any kind of mortgage at all.
These people are most definitely not my friends. to anyone who has recently bought property in London, it's insulting to claim that this is a large and frightening amount of debt. the current home-owning generation - my own - has had to stomach far, far greater sums.
How else are house prices supposed to have risen? I have one friend who bought a modest £200,000 flat in Wimbledon and had to borrow six times her salary.
When thousands of us are living with large amounts of mortgage debt far greater than this supposedly terrifying £50,000, we need to keep credit crunch anxieties in proportion and hold our nerve. Scare stories don't help.
The loan and HP debt figures from more deprived parts of the UK are far more worrying than these modest average London debts. It is much more scary to be living on benefits and facing repayments for a £2,000 loan with bailiffs sniffing at your door than it is to have 25 years to repay a lovely middle-class £50,000 mortgage. But is anyone really in this enviable position? I must ask some of my older neighbours - and see if they'll lend me a tenner at the same time.
An evangelist for our age
I do love stories about the beneficiaries of the credit crunch. The latest is Linda Evangelista, once washed-up, forgotten and discarded by the ad agencies, now reborn at 43 as Prada's new face.
Supposedly Evangelista and her fellow "veteran models" Claudia Schiffer, Christy Turlington and Naomi Campbell are making a comeback because they have the stylish gravitas required to persuade women to splash out on designer items in these cash-strapped times.
Or could it be that fashion houses are finally admitting what they have known all along? That only women of a certain age can afford their wares and their potential customers are sick of seeing clothes modelled by pimply faced 16-year-olds?
I weigh in with the Tories
There is no excuse for being overweight and people need to take responsibility for their eating habits, so shadow health spokesman Andrew Lansley told us yesterday - and he's right.
The Conservatives are getting dangerously good at stating home truths which resonate with most people. opposing obesity is basic common sense but somehow it has become the unsayable: it is not good to be fat.
A reader recently sent me chapter and verse on the evidence that obesity is genetic. I don't doubt it.
But there are genes and there is chronic over-eating - and our society is in the grip of the latter. As a recovering biscuit addict, I know this - and I have wilfully hauled myself out of the lardy danger zone.
Now, however, another health concern plagues me. I have to stop agreeing with the Tories on things. It will be the death of me.
