Stop whining and tuck into the 2p sausages

WILL YOU please stop whining at the back? Yes, your house might be worth five grand less than it was last week, but what does that matter unless you’re mad enough to want to move at the moment? And what about all those illusory £1,000 a month increases you’ve supposedly enjoyed for the past five years? You’re just gutted that you didn’t cash in when you had the chance.

But even then, the money was just paper money. Unless you were in the fortunate position of having got rid of your cash-leeching kids and were able to downsize from the four-bed suburban semi to that little cottage in the Dales, the new house you would have bought would have also gone up in price exponentially, so in the end no-one wins apart from the estate agents, the solicitors and the stamp duty thieves of central government.

That’s what makes me so mad about this current wave of economic panic sweeping the country. How much of it is real and how much of it is created by the scare-mongering media?

Yes, it makes your eyes water when you fill up your 4x4 at the garage. Yes, food prices are on the up – although an extra few pence on a packet of pasta or a loaf of bread is hardly going to result in widespread middle class starvation. Not when you can buy three cases of wife-beater for £20 or a pack of 2p sausages at Asda.

Of course it’s a bit tough if you’re just coming to end of a fixed-rate mortgage, but isn’t that the nature of fixed-rate mortgages? It’s swings and roundabouts: you’ve had the good times and now you’ll have to get real.

And yes, I do have some vague sympathy for those buffoons who took out 125 per cent mortgages with Northern Rock, but surely they realised that they would be in negative equity from day one?

I honestly think that we’re talking ourselves into a slump, instead of a momentary blip. I listened to a radio programme the other day where idiot after idiot called up to relate a horror story they’d heard from The Man Down The Pub.

“His mate was evicted after his mortgage payments went up 50 per cent.”

“His wife has to walk 13 miles to work because they can’t afford the petrol.”

“They’re now living in a cardboard box in t’middle of t’road.”

On and on it went, with the moronic presenter failing to extract a single fact to support these apocryphal tales of woe. No wonder people are selling their children and eating gravel. The economy of this country is no longer controlled by the Chancellor of the Exchequer. It’s The Man Down The Pub who is calling the shots.

We should invoke the spirit of Corporal Jones instead of frightening ourselves to monetary death. And if all else fails, there’s always those 2p Asda sausages.

SPEAKING OF which, a girl of 12 brought up by her parents on a strict vegan diet has been admitted to hospital with a degenerative bone condition said to have left her with the spine of an 80-year-old.

Now doctors are under pressure to report the couple, from Glasgow, to police and social workers amid concerns that her health and welfare may have been neglected in pursuit of their beliefs.

The youngster, fed on a strict meat-free and dairy-free diet from birth, is being treated for a severe form of rickets and has a number of fractured bones. The condition is caused by a lack of vitamin D, which is needed to absorb calcium and is found in liver, oily fish and dairy produce.

I think you know my views on this. A far as I’m concerned, militant vegetarianism verges on a hate crime. Hitler was a vegetarian and he banned smoking. Look where that got us. Inflicting lentils on an innocent child is abuse of the worst possible kind.

Which brings us to a conversation overheard on a bus (not by me, I hasten to add).

“My daughter's a vegetarian now,” said one woman to her companion, “but I still put Oxo in all her dinners as I don't want her getting rickets.”

Now that’s what I call proper parenting.

SPEAKING OF overheard conversations, have this one, fresh from the meat counter at Waitrose.

“We’re not having any more kids.”

“Two’s enough then?”

“Oh no, but a psychic I went to in Blackpool said that I’d have a boy and a girl and we’ve got them now.”

You just know that nine months on this woman would be astonished to find herself pregnant again after not bothering with contraception because she didn’t think she’d need it. I blame school dinners for this abject stupidity - not enough meat.

AN OLD folks’ home in Germany has come up with a cunning plan to stem the tide of escaping pensioners – a fake bus stop outside the front door.

What happens is that the elderly residents, most of them suffering from that Old Timer’s Disease, get the urge to go walkabout, see the bus stop and wait for their getaway transport to arrive. Of course it never does and they eventually forget what they’re doing there and go back to their rooms.

It’s a stroke of genius from the people who brought you Colditz.

I said, of course it never does and they eventually forget what they’re doing there and go back to their rooms. Back to their rooms.

FORGIVE ME, but I thought that dolphins, like the 26 which died on mud flats in a Cornish river after running aground, were supposed to be intelligent? Not so smart now eh, you clacky-voiced show-offs?