Dingleberry

Huh. Cleggy didn't get his ten grand Income Tax cutoff, though they want to 'take real steps' towards it. It's more like 7.4 grand.

CGT. Here we go. Come on.

You are losing your marbles, in a manner of speaking. What you've got is standard nesting anxiety, and it hits a lot of people who are having kids. What you're craving is the symbolic security of owning property, but the problem is that to do that, you'd need to buy a property. That doesn't suddenly become a good idea just because you've got a baby coming. Financial imprudence because of deep emotional cravings isn't something you'll thank yourself for a few years down the line.

Who ordered the plateful of screaming catharsis?

It's like biting on tinfoil, is this.

Certainly is. All the dialogue was improvised. The director briefed the actors on what was supposed to happen in the scene, and they ran with it.

Good lord, is there no limit to your exposure? So how much did you splash out on THAT one? Joking apart, I really do sympathise on this.

So, you bought in Manchester, but you're living in London. Why didn't you buy in London? Couldn't afford to, obviously. So how do you manage to live in London? Could this mean you're renting there? No - the way you go on about renting, that would make you a grade-A hypocrite. Which means... You're living with your mum, aren't you?

You clearly have a passionate need to believe in defiance of the evidence. That's commonly a religious trait.

Then you have even less of an excuse. Come on - you know how much property in Manc is really worth. Oh, sorry - I misunderstood you before. I thought you were saying you'd bought it FOR 140, down from 158. If you spent 158 thousand quid on a FLAT, well... God help you. I'm not enjoying this so much now I know you were local. It's one thing when Mancs fleece Londoners out of silly money. But for someone from round here to fall for it... it's just not right.

It's 'lose' not 'loose'. Although I used to be fairly loose, as many of the girls from the Banshee on Oxford Road would tell you. And seeing as the whole idea was to find out as much about your tragic situation as possible, we'll see who 'loost'.

You spent one hundred and forty thousand pounds on a flat? In Didsbury? I'm going to make some educated guesses here... 1. You've never actually lived in Manchester until very recently. 2. You were assured by someone else that this would be a rock-solid investment. 3. You expected to be able to rent out to vibrant young professionals, because that's the sort of area it is. 4. You are under 30. 5. You didn't spend much time in the area before deciding to buy. 6. You earn under 30k p.a. 7. You know your investment in Didsbury is worth less than it was, but you don't actually want to know how much less. 8. You used to be very religious for a while but are less so now. How many did I get right?

How much was it?

AHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHHAAH *breath* AHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHHAHAHAHAHAH FLATS in DIDSBURY? And he thinks they're going to go back up in value one day? Thanks. You just made my afternoon.

Ignore it, it's completely put on. He doesn't have contempt for tenants, he's just terrified of being one.

Belief in the blanket truth of statements like this is why a lot of very foolish people are losing a staggering amount of money... people like the OP's landlord, by the sound of it. It should be obvious even to a flatworm that owning your home is only better than renting if you don't spend far more to buy it than you would on renting until prices reach a sane level. Beyond a certain point in the boom-bust cycle, the smart money stays out of property while the idiots are still piling in, chanting slogans like the one above.

'due to personal circumstances they would be selling the property.' Which person sounds more shafted to you? The person renting the property, whose rights are protected by law and can always find somewhere else to rent, or the person desperate to flog the property in a falling market? And I don't think I ever got a response... were you actually gormless enough to buy property in MANCHESTER of all places?

Hang on. You didn't buy property in Manchester, did you?

Fresh from her spit-roasting in the Guardian comments section...

Oh yes. Currently on: property developer persuading a family to live in his own ******** passage.

'The banks’ requests have come as lenders start exercising little-known clauses that allow them to demand additional funds if the owner’s equity shrinks in relation to the value of the property.' Little-known. Not rare... just little-known. Oh dearie, dearie me.

Rented accomodation is poisonous to babies ... so long as they're white babies from English-speaking families of course

But you have to remember that in England, the landlords weren't just privileged members of the native people. They belonged to an alien and invasive culture. That's why, for example, we have 'swine' in the field and 'pork' on the table - the peasantry inherited the old English terms, the aristocracy the French. (In France, where renting is the norm, they EXECUTED their aristocracy. That's not a coincidence!) Moreover, we have kept the feudal system's trappings alive to an extent that no other country has. We're still a monarchy, for one thing. We have blatant classism, both regular and inverse. And underpinning the whole thing is the belief that anyone who rents property, HAS to rent property. It can never be understood as a free and voluntary choice on the individual's part. It's always something they are somehow forced into. In other words, it's a fate they are condemned to, because such is the lot of the peasantry. Rent anything else but property in England, and nobody bats an eyelid. Rent a house, and suddenly it says something about your place in the social heirarchy. You might as well be cropping turnips. That attitude didn't arise out of a vacuum. It's been congealed through centuries of unspoken historical resentment.

It goes all the way back to the Norman Conquest. The victors occupied the castles, the vanquished rented the hovels. You see, it's not that the British love houses. Secretly, they hate and resent them. The real truth is that the British (actually, it's more like the English) are terrified of serfdom. The history of the country means that the landlord classes got to live in the big house, or the castle, or the manor, or wherever else, while the poor old tenants huddled around it and paid the rent. Every year they'd go and sing grovelly wassail songs in the hope they'd be treated well. Unlike the Continent, especially France with her liberte egalite fraternite, the memory of the feudal system simply never washed away. People are sickeningly desperate to have property, to get on the completely mythical 'property ladder', not because of the advantages it might bring but because it means they won't be seen as serfs. In England, a business that pays rent is completely ordinary, but a person who pays rent is automatically associated (however unconsciously) with peasantry. You'd have thought that after nearly a thousand years, we'd have put the Norman Conquest behind us, but apparently not.

Hang about... is this putative bit of bling called the Gem of Tanzania or the Star of Zanzibar? Star of Zanzibar Gem of Tanzania I am alarmed to have discovered an inconsistency in what was otherwise a wholly credible account.