Shoots of recovery shot down in flames

Well that's a welcome piece of news, I must say. While all around us global corporations are collapsing like rails of shirts, international banks are begging for spare change for a cup of tea, and interest rates are at their lowest for 300 years, the price of houses is going up. Halifax reports that house prices in January — for the first time in 11 months — rose 1.9 per cent.

This is, obviously, of particular interest if, like me, you've just moved into a new house you can ill afford, and have been unpacking boxes of glassware wrapped in newspapers that tell you it will be worth bupkis this time next year.

Is this a green shoot of recovery, I asked a friend who understands money. No, he said: things are still more chute than shoot. One swallow doesn't make a summer, and this swallow, momentarily disoriented, has mistaken its migration path.

Then he said something about a dead cat bounce, and my eyes dazzled with tears at the thought of my own pet's eventual end. Shoots, cats, swallows. We're all here for the long haul.

It's all about location, though, isn't it? My old house, for instance, was conveniently situated for those yellow sandwich boards marked "Witness Appeal" that are such catnip to estate agents. Now I'm quite near Budgens, which provides a prime opportunity to hobnob with glamorous local characters.

The other day I approached the checkout with the usual payload of crisps, wood-glue and tuna, to be confronted by the rear elevation of a scruffily dressed woman in late middle age.

She was standing six to eight feet from the counter and sort of calling out to the member of staff over the distance, tripping nervously from side to side.

"I'm not going anywhere near it," she was saying. "No — you've got to come out here. Over here maybe." She shuffled crablike towards the newspaper stand.

Her netting rucksack was stuffed with soya milk and spelt biscuits, and her hair was sticking out. Loony, I thought, obviously.

The member of staff met her halfway, and she gingerly passed them something over an invisible electric fence. "If you're on the homeopathy I'm on you can't get near these electric fields," she explained. Between members of the psychologically inconvenienced community, and wealthy hippies out shopping for goat's milk, you sometimes cannot get a pin.

Why is it, I wonder, that vicious four-letter tirades such as Christian Bale's (right) recent attack on a colleague — already now remixed as a banging club choon — evoke such amusement and sneaking admiration? It's nice to think we side with underdogs but, really, it's the bullies we envy.