The brilliant Bird & Fortune explain the credit crunch…

Bird: … all the milk is standing around and gets rancid and hardens, and then when you get hard milk what do you get?

Fortune: Cheese.

Bird: No, no, no, no, no. It’s more like a jelly. It wobbles, you see.

And at this point the man in the street turns to his wife and says, “Irene,” or whatever her name happens to be, “em, we can’t have that new house you wanted because all the milk has turned to jelly.”

I hope that’s clear…

Mervyn King, top banana at the Bank of England, hit the headlines today because he dared to utter the ‘R’ word - recession.

I like Merv. His press appearances at the Bank of England’s Quarterly Cure For Insomnia have always been enlivened by his intellectual sophistication and sly sense of humour.

He seems like a really good bloke, King, which is why I’m almost reluctant to point out that as I was reading the news reports today I couldn’t help feeling he reminded me of someone.

But who? Later in the day a light bulb flashed in my noggin: Penfold! You know … from Dangermouse.

Ok, I’ll grant you: the resemblance is not as uncanny as Steve Martin and Alistair Darling … but still, it’s pretty darn* close…

Question is: who would be Dangermouse to Merv’s Penfold? Suggestions please…

*Howdedoodee Palin fans, apologies Obama supporters …

My new favourite designers are the Play Coalition, who first came to my attention with their selfless light fitting, The Martyr; a neat little visual pun on the idea of energy-saving.

They’ve now come up with a crazy, Tim Burton-esque solution to light-starved houseplants, The Plantbot.

Slap in your favourite fern, yucca, whatever and say goodbye to wilted foliage as the Plantbot doggedly follows sunlight around your room.

Warning: if the Day Of The Triffids gave you nightmares when you were a kid, it’s probably not for you.

But if the idea of a perambulating plantpot shakes your branches, you can see more pics at the Play Coalition website.

If nothing else it’ll freak the hell out of the cat. No more peeing in the plantpot for you Mr Moggy!

(All pics: The Play Coalition)

I’ve been looking at pictures of the Kingsway Exchange bunker complex … which has just come on the market … and I can’t shake off an overwhelming sense of dread and panic.

Maybe it’s because to my eyes those long yawning corridors look like something from the spaceship in Alien.

You just know that if you ever have to take refuge here you’re going to end up in a lung-bursting sprint down these corridors with lights flickering, klaxons blaring, pipes bursting and something big slithery and … Oh j j jesus… What’s that overhe… aggghhhhh!!!

That’s bad enough.

But then I looked at the living quarters and I started to pray that if ever there’s a nuclear strike on London I’ll be close to the bomb blast because I’m not sure I could endure the awful tedium of brown carpet tiles creeping up the cafeteria walls and … year after year of … snooker.

The complex was initially constructed as a communications and intelligence hub if the Germans invaded … and later it contained a ‘hot line’ connecting the White House directly to the Kremlin during the Cold War.

(It’s 1974. A red phone echoes shrilly down the corridors. A hand adorned with a sovereign picks it up: “Nikolai, mate, look, let’s knock this arms race on the ‘ed and settle this like men … best of 17 frames?)

No wonder Churchill was keen to fight ‘em on the beaches instead …

If you like this kind if thing, you’ll love Subterranea Britannica Ltd.

Full details of The Kingsway Exchange.

It’s official: Glasgow is great. The Dear Green Place has only gone and made it into the Lonely Planet’s Top Ten list of best cities for visitors.

Not only that but it was the sole UK city to be included. Even better, it beat Edinburgh! Bring it on.

Of course, this news comes as no surprise to me – being a local lassie, I know how fantastic Glasgow is.

The city is blessed with stunning architecture, a surprising amount of greenery, first-class theatres, galleries and museums, an easy-peasy subway system, and absolutely fabulous shops, sweetie.

Kelvingrove Art Gallery & Museum

And, contrary to popular belief, the West Coast of Scotland diet doesn’t consist purely of deep-fried Mars bars.

Nope. You can actually have whichever type of chocolate you want fried in batter - although your more discerning diners will find plenty to scintillate their delicate taste buds, too.

The other wide-held notion of Scots enjoying a tipple or twenty is, however, almost universally true – my own favourite spot for this is the West End’s Ashton Lane, a wee piece of drinking and dining heaven that makes my heart sing…even when I’m sober.

Ashton Lane

But – and I reckon this is where Glasgow’s greatness really lies – local people  have such a deep-rooted sense of pride in their city that they’ll go out of their way to make sure visitors receive a warm welcome.

Glasgow: it’s pure dead brilliant, by the way.

Suggestions please on which cities you’d include in your Top Ten list for visitors…

Not that I want to blow our own trumpet (toot-toot!) but it seems the good people (person?) over at the Property Owl Blog have some kind words to say about how engaging our humble blog is:

“Findaproperty.com rightly identified this area recently and now produce a good and interesting blog, which is aimed more at the punter.”

Good, interesting and punter-friendly, that describes us very well. (We’ll let you off the fact that you forgot ‘devastatingly witty, supremely sexy, godlike genii’.)

Thank you Property Owl, you’re our new best friend.

Last week I asked whether it was time to start buying again. Among those who responded 65 per cent said no, the market has further to fall and 35 per cent said yes, we’re over the worst.

My own view is this: the market does have further to fall, but yes, we are over the worst (talk about having yer cake!) .

That might sound like lunacy, not least when you look at today’s report from the Royal Institution of Chartered Surveyors. But with the benefit of hindsight we will, I suspect, view this RICS report as marker of the market’s low point.

FindaProperty’s editor considers the property space-time continuum (while riding a bike)

Why? The problem in recent months has been mortgage availability, and yesterday’s announcements should make it easier for home buyers to get their hands on the money they need to move.

Not as easy to get hold of as it has been in the past, for sure, but easier.

That will boost transaction levels and as a consequence I expect the supply/demand imbalance, which currently favours buyers, to start edging back in the direction of sellers.

Prices do still have further to fall, but the pace of the falls will ease (that’s already happening) as confidence gradually returns.

Come next spring - if (big if, I know) the mortgage companies deliver - we could be looking at a very different situation. I don’t expect prices to have recovered by then, but I do expect things to have stabilised.

So for buyers sitting on the sidelines, the coming months could present a real window of opportunity.

It is, as I noted last week, always better to buy close to the bottom than to end up on the wrong side of the revival.  We’re not quite there yet, but we’re definitely heading in the right direction.

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During WWII the Ministry of Information printed bright red signs with this ‘chin up’ message.

Now a Tunbridge Wells estate agent has dusted one off and placed it in his front window.

Full marks, we say, to the folks at  Alexandre Boyes for their wry sense of humour … and well done, too, for a clever piece of marketing in the midst of the downturn.

All we need now is for Girls Aloud to release a cover version of “We’ll Meet Again”…

Altogether now…

We’ll move again, don’t know where, don’t know when,
But I know we’ll move again, some sunny day.
Keep smiling through, just like you always do,
‘Til the billions drive the credit crunch away.

For more old WWII posters from the MoI, check out National Archives: The Art of War

In honour of their 10th birthday Google are offering their earliest searchable database from 2001. (So what happened to the 1998-2000 databases eh? Did the cleaner throw them out?)

Anyway, I did a search for ‘FindaProperty.com’ just to see, curious like, and my! How we’ve grown!

Way back in the day, we had a mere 26,158 properties advertised by just 559 agents, but as of today, oh, only 614,938 properties for sale and rent from 9,094 estate agents.

Blimey!

Then:

And now:

The Google results count has changed somewhat as well.

• In 2001 there was a grand total of 4230 results for a ‘FindaProperty.com’ search
• Today there are a whopping 1,870,000 results – so a big up to our SEO team! Woop! Woop!

But before we adorn ourselves with laurel wreaths, here’s a sign of the times. Guess who, in 2001, had 953,000 results on Google but now has 41,600,000?*

Britney, Britney, Britney… what have we done to you?

(* with Safesearch on, workplace computers and all that)

Here at Winging It, we’re all big fans of Charlie Brooker, the highly amusing Guardian columnist.

We also love Big Brother.  Okay, okay, that’s actually just me; the others have more refined tastes, if you overlook their unshakeable devotion to Kevin McCloud.

So it was a happy day - for me, anyway - when I read that Charlie, master of pithy penmanship and brilliantly vivid flights of fancy – has written a TV series set in the Big Brother House.

The premise is something like this: the UK becomes overrun by zombies but, locked away from the outside world, the BB housemates are utterly ignorant.

Sorry, par for the course – the BB housemates are utterly ignorant of the situation.

So in a bizarre twist of fate, this turns the Big Brother House into a place where even sensible people are clamouring to enter.  Not for long, though, because an eviction night is looming…

Brooker describes the series thusly: “‘Dead Set’ isn’t an out-and-out comedy, but an unashamedly populist horror-thriller with blackly comic undertones.

“Think ‘24′ with zombies. And housemates. And gore.”

‘Dead Set’ is due to start on E4 later this month, and features cameos from some former real-life contestants; is it bad to hope that they come to suitably gruesome fictional endings?

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