There is a house in New Orleans Cromer that’s been on the market for quite a while.
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I, Editor by Henry Gee
This is the Nature Network and therefore Terribly Extremely Very Serious foothold for Nature Senior Editor Henry Gee. If you want fun and games, visit http://cromercrox.blogspot.com/
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Surreal Estate
- Date:
- Friday, 06 Mar ch 2009 - 15:03 UTC
Yes, this 10-bedroom Edwardian villa called Holly House
Of The Rising Sun, located in one of Cromer’s poshest streets, can be yours for a mere £525,000, or probably less if you haggle. It’s fairly typical of its era, a grand seaside residence built in Cromer’s fin-de-siecle heyday. The special thing about this house, though, is that it’s probably one of the very few of its kind left that hasn’t been converted into flats, a hotel, or a retirement home. Yes, it does come with planning consent to convert into five flats, but you could move straight in and live in it as an Englishman’s Castle.The problem is, who’s buying? Even at this price, which in some parts of London would hardly get you a 25-year-lease on half a lock-up garage, it remains forlorn, desolate … unloved.
Still, that hasn’t stopped the Gees walking past, now and again, and wondering, if we won the lottery, or I wrote that massive bestseller I keep not writing, whether we’d relocate to such a pile. Think of the space! As visitors to the Maison des Girrafes will appreciate, ours is a bijou residence (what estate agents call ‘deceptively spacious’) and there are times when you really need a one-way system to get from A to B, even without tripping up over dogs/children/chickens/Frank Norman. Were we to own an Edwardian villa, we could have hosted the entire CISB in one of the smaller bedrooms with room to spare.
But behind every silver lining is a cloud. A house like that needs staff. Even at the Maison des Girrafes I do sometimes wonder, as I retire gratefully to bed of an evening, how it is we don’t manage without a housekeeper, valet, chauffeur, cook, gardener and maid. Clearly, Holly House was designed in the days when householders not only had staff, but staff who would live in: if you look carefully at the floor plans, you’ll see a back staircase that runs from the kitchens and pantry all the way up to the three bedrooms in the attic, bypassing the public rooms and the seven bedrooms on the first floor. These attic spaces were, presumably, servants’ quarters. Such a grand menage (as opposed to a grand menagerie, which we have already) takes a great deal of upkeep. Even with no staff, the heating bills must be huge: the energy rating is ‘G’, a band reserved for people who don’t mind things a little chilly, or who are well-heeled climate-change deniers. Houses like this are dinosaurs, behemoths of the past.
Or are they? I think that things are changing, for several reasons, many connected with the recession.
First, house prices are plunging as fast as Nigella Lawson’s neckline,
Nigella Lawson,voluptuous sexpotcelebrity chef. Neckline (almost) not picturedhurled headlong, in Miltonic manner, over the aetherial
prepuceprecipice, to such an extent that even Nature editors might find that houses like this are within their grasp (oh, you wish – Ed).Second, the forced retirement age of 65, customary in Britain, has today been ruled as legal by the European Court. What with the fact that people generally live longer than they once did (and remain in good health), this means that there are a lot of sixty and even seventy-somethings who are forced into retirement but, with interest rates now even lower than Nigella Lawson’s neckline,
Nigella Lawson: neckline now almost completely out of shotsuch that they will be unable to live solely on their savings, will be looking for work – as handymen, gardeners, odd-jobbers…. and who knows, even valets and butlers. In fact, I have a neighbour who is as strong as a horse despite being in his seventies, and who supplements his state pension with a spot of odd-jobbery here and there. Last year he dug a tremendous hole in the front yard of the Maison des Girrafes.
Third, what with the recession, lots of people will be looking for second or even third jobs to make ends meet. In many places, such as Cromer, this is already happening. I know bus drivers who moonlight as builders, nurses who do shifts in chip shops, nightclub singers who do childminding by day … the list goes on.
If the economy goes the way it’s going, and continues to do so for a while, I expect that all these factors will converge – especially if we enter a period of deflation. Already, prices and wages are static or falling, and may still will plummet to a degree that would put Nigella’s neckline round her knees (decency forbids me posting a picture, sadly). The clock may yet go back, such that it will once more become affordable for many people of otherwise modest means to hire servants.
Some may baulk at this idea – except that we’re doing it already. Who hasn’t hired a cleaner occasionally? An odd-job man? A gardener? We’ll be doing it more and more, I think. It all keeps the economy going, after a fashion, and helps redistribute wealth more equably without the taxpayer taking up unnecessary burdens. And, in any case, who wouldn’t rather be writing, or working, or earning money doing what one is good at, without the constant distraction of chores?
Hilaire Belloc, writing in another age, put it very well.
Lord Finchley tried to mend the Electric Light
Himself. It struck him dead: And serve him right!
It is the business of the wealthy man
To give employment to the artisan.Last updated: Friday, 06 Mar 2009 - 15:03 UTC
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Comments
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I think it’s fun to imagine what it must be like to live in a large house such as the one shown. There was an old abandoned mansion near my childhood neighborhood, and we’d beg and beg to be taken over to explore it. And near the stables where I used to keep my horses here in San Antonio, there was a strange, sprawling single-story mansion, abandoned by the people who (once) owned the polo grounds. I was keen to explore that one as well, but retreated after looking at a few rooms that were full of wasps’ nests (WASP nests as well HAHAHAHAH!).
Maintenance of such houses and the grounds requires staff, of course, and I’m rather squicked by that idea. I’ve never had a gardener or cleaner in my house, and only very recently (and reluctantly) had to hire an odd jobs man to repair a wind-damaged section of fence in my yard, which was beyond my abilities and tool set to fix. Part of my reluctance is due to discomfort with anything that smacks of class issues, and an equal part is due to my misguided belief that I can figure out how to perform any task, given enough time and the proper books or instructions.
squicked. Good word, that. Nice, woody word. As the shadows of an English summer evening lengthen across the sward, no sound can be herad but for the squick of leather upon willow.
Love the neckline! Nigella is a fearsomely talented woman, as well as having a neckline and being able to cook. When the internet was young, her then-husband, the late John Diamond, wrote a Times column on this new fangled technology and how to use it. One day he chose as his subject “search”, and proceeded to find out about some esoteric word using the tool (before Google was born, naturally). In the time it took him to find the answer, his wife had gone upstairs, found the dictionary, looked it up and written down the answer for him.
On the house – it does look lovely, but never mind the maintenance, do you think it is structurally sound? Many of these lovely but abandoned houses need 2 or 3 times the asking price spent on them before they would pass a survey – one reason for its relative cheapness? At least the MdG is warm and cosy, with all those g pigs, snakes etc providing plenty of insulation. You’d need an awful lot of g pigs and snakes to keep an edifice like the one in your (first) picture warm.
Nigella is indeed a goddess in all departments – physical and intellectual. And she writes cookbooks that make me want to dribble.
On the structural soundness of Holly House — I have no idea. But as the house is vacant, me and Heidi have had a good nose round and I didn’t see any obvious cracks or signs of subsidence. Bits of the paintwork on the dormers (not seen in any of the pictures) look a bit ropey, and I’d imagine that there is some work to be done on the roof. Quite a few of the windows wwould also need replacing. Without having seen it I reckon it might need at least £100,000 of work. If it were mine I’d also put a bloody great Edwardian-style conservatory on the back (at present there’s an asphalt yard and a rather dilpadated wooden shed), and this would cost £££.
A problem with long-abandoned houses is that they do get rather damp, and have to be warmed and dried very gently. I remember when Mrs Gee and I bought our first house, a small Edwardian terrace in Ealing that had been vacant for a while and had got a bit damp. As soon as we moved in (it was December) I turned up the heating and – spunggg! – all the plaster on the walls cracked up at once, so it looked like a lot of ferrets had been fighting behind the wallpaper.
When I was lad I always fancied doing up a local ruin by the name of Clegg Hall (no, really). Until recently it looked like this
- it hadn’t been lived in for over 50 years. But remarkably someone (not me!) has recently done it up so it is now in pristine glory like this
I hate to think what it cost.
Now that’s a house that does need servants.
Wow! That is a grand residence.
Knowing you, Henry, there probably really was a load of ferrets in residence behind the wallpaper.
We didn’t have pets back then … so perhaps the wallpaper gave us ideas.
Or they were feral ferrets, who followed you to Norfolk, in hope of cosier climes…..
They remained in Ealing – we never did strip that wallpaper.
I love a good class divide. I’d love to have someone come and clean my house for me. And cook…actually, unless it was Nigella, sans neckline, maybe not. I like cooking. And to be honest, if I had a butler, I think I’d be too bloody guilty to have him do anything…
Ian – expediency soon removes those feelings of guilt, I assure you. The immediate precursor to the Maison des Girrafes was a house in Barkingside (not Ealing), which is located north of the
Islamic Republictorrid jungles of Ilford and south ofFootballers’ Wives Countrythe sunlit uplands of Chigwell. For quite a while we had a Polish cleaner called Aneta who was so thorough she only had to look at dirt and it vanished.And there came a time when we needed someone to collect Gees Minor and Minima from school and take them home and feed them, because me and Mrs Gee were both commuting, We were stuck, because our existing childminder had got another job, so what did we do? Had a brainwave, that’s what. My friend Tony, fellow synagogue regular and Spiritual Leader of the King Herod Appreciation Society, a former book-keeper of a certain age, was looking for work. So I hired him to look after the kids. Which he did.
After I posted that I realised I’m a massive hypocrite. My brother and I had au pairs for years because of dad being in the Navy and mum being a nurse and working all hours…
Well, there you go. Must dash – here comes Lane with my evening snifter.
(slobber) do you know, I only recently discovered Nigella. I’d been put off by her name for about a decade, stupid posh name that made her sound like a protozoan. She reminds me of a girl cashier I saw once at the co-op here — never seen her before, and she made me weak. I went through her line, went back and found something else to buy. Then I collected myself and went home.
I’m somewhat relieved to see an “economy circling the drain” post here, I’d begun to wonder if you guys were all in some alternate well-insulated socialist universe. Although I’m not sure drain-circling’s apt anymore; I think this was “crossing the event horizon” week. I’d feel a lot more sanguine about all this if we had some good coal closer than 800 mi. away.
The teaching assistants here have been so successful with their union that large depts. are cutting TA jobs, combining sections, and staffing them with panicked adjuncts that cost about a quarter what TAs do. Oops. Furloughs for faculty, and I’m hearing reports from around the country that the tenure track is not a safe place, contracts not being renewed, promotions not happening.
Anyway. Iowa’s got bankers’ mansions at rock-bottom prices, yo. Get you a sweet 6-bedroom Victorian for under $100K. You’ll have a 75-to-400-mile commute and a good view of tornadoes, but you gots to pay for that woodwork somehow.
@ Amy – stupid posh name that made her sound like a protozoan – laughed out loud, or would have done had there not been small children in the vicinity who’d taken an age to get to sleep, and I didn’t want to see all that effort wasted,
Protozoa have the best names. There’s one called Cafeteria, but my favorite is Reclinomonas americana which for some reason always brings this painting to mind.
I’d begun to wonder if you guys were all in some alternate well-insulated socialist universe
Not me, baby. I think posterity will show socialism to have been a crime against humanity. And that’s just the point. Harsh economic realities will show that the trade-union model is not sustainable except in the kind of prosperous capitalist society that socialists affect to despise. What people have forgotten about servants and service is that there could be a dignity and pride in the office, provided that servant and employer were very clear about who was whom and neither abused their position of trust.
Since I’ve had only either minimum wage jobs, graduate/postdoctoral fellowships, or academic positions, until very recently I could not afford cleaners, cooks, or gardeners. By now I’m deeply entrenched in the habit of performing all such tasks efficiently myself, and so it seems unlikely that I’d hire anyone else to do them. Besides, as a single female with no children, society might dictate that I don’t deserve these services anyway.
As an aside, in my undergraduate and graduate student days, I earned a little money with babysitting, pet-minding, house-sitting, cleaning, and gardening jobs, usually for my professors. Cleaning was the only one of those jobs that I resented pretty quickly.
Kristi – you raise quite a few interesting points here.
Since I’ve had only either minimum wage jobs, graduate/postdoctoral fellowships, or academic positions
The low pay and lack of job security of scientists – such that they can be compared with minimum-wage jobs – has been rehearsed too well on these fora to require any furthe discussion from me. What is happening these days, though, is that people in the once-propserous professional middle classes are finding it more and more difficult to make ends meet. Collectively, Mrs Gee and I earn a respectable income, but often find it quite hard to justify purchases which to many people who earn less would seem affordable. The reason is that we are suffering a double whammy – we are paying for everyone else’s socialist utopia without getting many of the benefits from it.
Besides, as a single female with no children, society might dictate that I don’t deserve these services anyway. It’s not just you. Society in Britain today dictates that people who have worked hard academically and have good jobs, irrespective of their parental status, don’t deserve to have society’s benefits, simply because they arre middle-class and therefore ‘privileged’. The truth is that we in the middle classes have become disenfranchised.
As an aside, in my undergraduate and graduate student days, I earned a little money with babysitting, pet-minding, house-sitting, cleaning, and gardening jobs, usually for my professors.
This kind of relationship is too easily open to exploitation. I’d love for us to get a cleaner, but Mrs Gee resists this for reasons of pride, and also because any cleaner we are likely to hire will be someone we know personally – such things demand a professional relationship.
Cleaning was the only one of those jobs that I resented pretty quickly
I don’t much like cleaning (or, rather, I do, but I have to be in the mood for it). However, some people actually like it. Our cleaner Aneta was passionate about it.
I should add, on the question of trust: the current recession is not a result of capitalism per se, but from the fact that people who were in a position of having our trust – bankers, financial managers and so on – abused the trust we had placed in them to look after our money responsibly.
The truth is that we in the middle classes have become disenfranchised
This is true to a large extent in the US as well, but I think there are some differences between the UK and the US, with respect to the specific example of whether a single professional woman, who has no children, deserves to hire a cleaner. In the US, the judgment goes beyond the economic categorization of middle class, as it also includes issues of gender, race, and ethnicity. I’m not going to go all bell hooks in your thread … I’m just sayin’.
I really don’t mind cleaning my own house for myself or for house guests, or homes of others as a favor to friends or family. Cleaning is not a demeaning or unpleasant task in and of itself. However, any residual inclination or temptation or release from societal sanction I might have had to hire a cleaner, has been eliminated after reading the chapter “Scrubbing in Maine”, in Barbara Ehrenreich’s book Nickel and Dimed.
Mrs Gee is currently
whooping it upattending a conference, so now I shall ask the cook (me) to make lunch, after which I shall have the maid (me) and the under-maids (Gees Minor and Minima) to clean the house.I apologize for any bits of yarn and stray beads that are undoubtedly still floating around the Maison des Girrafes. Art is necessarily a messy endeavor. ;-)
No apologies necessary! However, the advent of spring sunshine through the windows has only highlighted what has been a massive increase in entropy of various sorts.
I should add, on the question of trust: the current recession is not a result of capitalism per se, but from the fact that people who were in a position of having our trust – bankers, financial managers and so on – abused the trust
True enough, Henry, but it’s also too easy to put all the blame on the evil bankers. Regular people who got mortgages they knew were not in position to pay, in order to buy a brand new 12-room house and thus keep up with the neighbors are as responsible for what we have now as the bankers who should plainly have denied credit in cases like that. When you start spending money that you don’t have yet, it’s a clear sign you’re heading for trouble.
Nigella’s late sister was called Thomasina, and her niece (daughter of her brother Dominic Lawson) is, naturally, called Dominica.
@ Maxine: thanks for that. One can’t really imagine any of them being called Chantelle or Chardonnay.
@ Christian: Well, yes, people are greedy and gullible, and also financially illiterate. It was the bankers, who presumably knew what they were doing, who provided the easy credit, and were rewarded for doing so. Northern Rock, the first bank to go in the UK, had over-extended its mortgage lending because the more mortgages they sold, the more bonuses they got. Of course, they all thought the risk was acceptable because the markets just seemed to be going up and up. Gordon ‘The Moron’ Brown had convinced himself (and perhaps some others) that boom-and-bust had ended (he obviously never learned about King Canute), and few of the bankers were old enough to remember the last housing bubble, in the early 1990s..
And then came those credit-default swaps, in which all those toxic mortgages were wrapped up with loads of other debts and assets and traded, until nobody knew who had which bad debt on their books … and all of a sudden it was a game of financial chicken.
You talkin’ to me? I said, ARE YOU TALKIN’TO ME?
Credit default swaps are rather like the theory of relativity. Only three people in the world understand what they are – one is dead, one is mad, and the other is … ahem … helping police with their inquiries.
Harsh economic realities will show that the trade-union model is not sustainable except in the kind of prosperous capitalist society that socialists affect to despise.
Sure. That’s why I’m a little worried, here. Prosperity also makes being poor relatively comfortable, if you’re only money-poor. I’ve had a genius quality of life for the last 15 years or so despite making bupkes, and good healthcare, too. So long to all that.
The irony of the TA slaughter is that so many of them are in the American history PhD program. Unions, well, it doesn’t always work out so hot for the rank ’n file. Excelsior, or whatever it is they say.
What worries me about the current state of mind here is the lack of public imagination about how things must be. I’m watching demand drop like a rock, and thinking about break-even points and the evanescence of supply chains, and thinking of how people assume that when they go to stores, the stores will a) be open; b) be stuffed full of merchandise. We’ve already got a large population of unemployed & tenuously-employed zombies here wandering around trying not to have breakdowns, and I’m not really convinced they’d cope well with shortages and uneven geographic distribution of goods. I have a feeling we’d get stuck for an awfully long time on “Why? Why don’t we have tartar-removing toothpaste and lunchboxes? They have them in Bethesda, so why not here? It isn’t fair, we deserve tartar-removing toothpaste just as much as anyone else. Maybe we need to pray more.”
@ Henry: We have crooks? The hell you say! You know, the thing is, though, it hasn’t been a secret, what’s been going on. It was obvious to everyone & his brother that the banks were “making money” lending to poor people years ago, and it had to be lies because of the definition of poor. Even in the areas where the banks and investors really were collecting, like student loans, it obviously wasn’t sustainable. You can’t go on transferring money from young not-rich people to old rich people forever. I can still remember my shock the first time I saw a Student Loan Corporation quarterly report — the sums were vast, and moving in the wrong direction. It wasn’t just financially asinine; it was a social disaster in the making. So it didn’t really matter what clever mechanisms they’d found to make the frauds go — you could see that we were about to do a John Denver.
@ Cristian: Yes, I agree. People do this reliably, though. Make the credit available and they go nuts. They do it pretty fast, too. What’s extraordinary is how fast everything can go to hell, and how long it takes to clean up afterwards. It’s why I plan to traumatize my daughter with easy credit from Bank of Mom when she’s in her teens.
When terms such as “credit default swaps” were being slung around the news media, like slops to a pen of Gloucester Old Spots, I decided that I’d better learn what all this fancy financial patter meant. Kevin Phillips’ book Bad Money: Reckless Finance, Failed Politics, and the Global Crisis of American Capitalism was recommended to me, so I read it, and I would recommend it as well.
A friend (who is an expert in risk analysis, and has worked in this context in countries all over the world) maintains that the British, on the whole, are very risk-averse, as compared to Americans, who are quite risk-tolerant. If my friend is correct in this assessment, then I think it’s fair to say that financially risky (= irresponsible and selfish) behavior on the part of many Americans, has negatively impacted the finances and livelihoods of many more Britons (and undoubtedly citizens of other countries, such as Iceland). Obvious, perhaps, to a number of people, but such connections and consequences are not discussed by the majority of US news media. Nor is there a particular stigma attached to financially
stupidrisky behavior in the US, even in light of the current economic recession. Rather, people who are financially risk-averse, like myself, are often mocked for their caution.Sorry, should’ve said “on that scale”. If the old rich people are crafty & careful it can go on all de time.
_ I turned up the heating and – spunggg! – all the plaster on the walls cracked up at once, so it looked like a lot of ferrets had been fighting behind the wallpaper._
Hee hee. I rented a
cardboardplywoodworthy Colonialdumpshingly affair in Providence once, and offered to paint the living room. Apparently I had a paintbrush from the X-Men Everyday Style series because as soon as it touched the plaster the stuff crumbled and left horsehair bristling out all over the place. The landlord, a flamingly gay insane man, fixed it up right away, then drove all over southern New England to find paint in a shade of “mourning dove” (a sort of diarrheaic tan) that would “look well with your Persian rugs.” He and his partner gave me & non-spawning boyfriend a housewarming gift of an obscene fertility figurine. We were aghast, yet charmed.I’m not really convinced they’d cope well with shortages and uneven geographic distribution of goods. I have a feeling we’d get stuck for an awfully long time on “Why? Why don’t we have tartar-removing toothpaste and lunchboxes?
Let them eat cake. One cultural learnings the foreigner has when arriving in the good old U. S. and A. is the sheer abundance of everything and the ease of getting it. When I was living in LA and walked to the store (it would have been easier to drive – in LA the only people who walk are the very poor, the insane, and British visiting faculty) for a pint of milk, the choice made me want to cry. All I wanted was a pint of milk, but I could have had skimmed, semi skimmed, with extra calcium, with extra vitamin D, gluten-free, turpentine-free, with bits in, not with bits in, half-cream or with extra added cormorants and combinations of the above. ’Can’t I just have a pint of milk?’ I whimpered.
When terms such as “credit default swaps” were being slung around the news media, like slops to a pen of Gloucester Old Spots
I think I prefer Old Spots to Default Swaps. They’re friendlier, you know where they are, and they make nicer sausages.
A friend (who is an expert in risk analysis, and has worked in this context in countries all over the world) maintains that the British, on the whole, are very risk-averse, as compared to Americans, who are quite risk-tolerant.
Not sure that’s wholly true, especially not in the City of London. I lunched recently with a friend who is a higher-up in an investment bank. He told me how banking works. (Deep Breath). You have some money. You then borrow twenty times that sum. You then lend the lot to somebody else. You make money on the supposition that the rate of interest you are paying on the loan you’ve taken is less than the rate you’re charging to the people to whom you’re lending. Credit-default swaps are typical of the edginess of City trading – people sell things to other people that they haven’t even bought themselves, a kind of second-order credit.
Nor is there a particular stigma attached to financially stupid risky behavior in the US, even in light of the current economic recession. Rather, people who are financially risk-averse, like myself, are often mocked for their caution
That’s true here, too. Thinking that the housing bubble couldn’t have gone on forever, I sold my tiny box in London for a quarter of a million pounds – the sum made me gasp but my neighbours thought it undervalued – and bought the M des Gs outright for £140,000. No more mortgage. The M des Gs may be tiny, but it’s all mine.
It’s always amazed me how anyone could rustle up the sums necessary to buy something like Holly House. Before everything went Nigella I asked a friend of mine who is into property development, not short of a bob or two, and whom I suspect is not (how shall I put this charitably?) averse to risk. His answer was clear – people lie about their earnings, and the lenders – who get bonuses for lending – are not inclined to check them out. They then take interest-only mortgages. This model works fine, of course, provided that the market is always rising.
If you talk privately to financial advisers, they’ll say that in their personal lives they never buy anything unless they’ve saved up fo it first. In public, is all lend and spend. The whole economy is built on debt: I have discovered that if I wanted to borrow money against my house, I could borrow a lot more had I a mortgage on it, because I’d be seen as a better risk. What’s that? You’re a better risk if you are in debt, rather than not? It’s crazy.
He and his partner gave me & non-spawning boyfriend a housewarming gift of an obscene fertility figurine. We were aghast, yet charmed
Please post picture of figurine.
the British, on the whole, are very risk-averse, as compared to Americans, who are quite risk-tolerant.
That’s what, a priori, I’d have thought too, but the reality clearly contradicts it: the British economy seems to be even worse nowadays than in the States, specially comparing it with the “boom” of 12 months ago. This is direct evidence that there was a huge bubble behind the “boom”, and we know what kind of attitude it takes to create such a bubble. Compare it with countries on the euro zone too, where things are bad, but not nearly as bad as in here. It seems like British obsession for everything American has translated into financial irresponsability too…
I still think that the culture of risky financial behavior extends well beyond Wall Street financiers (City of London type equivalents) and real estate speculators in the US, and that the housing market bubble spread further down the economic ladder here. We don’t really have an equivalent of council housing here in the US, and apparently (almost) no one thought it was a bad idea to make loans to people with incomes less than $40,000, such that they could buy a houses priced at $400,000 or more. Also, here in the US, one loses health care coverage long before one hits financial rock bottom – that risk never has to be taken in the UK.
Most medical and dental students here in the US take out huge loans for their professional education, on top of those already incurred for undergraduate education. Hundreds of thousands of dollars, in some cases. If this were necessary to obtain the same degrees in the UK, would it alter the numbers of medical and dental students? What if you flunk out? What if you find you don’t really want to be a physician or a dentist? To compound the tolerance for debt and risk, many students choose to buy a house and/or have children during this period.
We don’t really have an equivalent of council housing here in the US, and apparently (almost) no one thought it was a bad idea to make loans to people with incomes less than $40,000, such that they could buy a houses priced at $400,000 or more
Mrs Thatcher (Blessed Be She) instituted a scheme whereby Council-House tennants could buy their own homes at a huge discount, provided they didn’t sell theem on for a period of five (now three) years. I bought the M des Gs off the tenant who’d been in the house since the 1970s. He’d upgraded it at the taxpayer’s expense, then bought it at an enormous discount on market value (he paid £26,000 when it would have been worth two or thrree times as much on the opeen market) and after five years sold it to me for £140,000, which he thought was an immense amount and I thought was a bargain, so everyone was happy.
The mistake made in America was the idea of opening up th ‘American Dream’ to those otherwise excluded from it, without building in any provision for the consequences – the result being that Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae looked somewhat dyspeptic.
Fannie Mae and Freddie mac, yesterday. An old one, I know, but worth repeating
For some reason I feel a totally gratuitous picture of Nigella Lawson coming on.
Nigella is always gratuitous, and that’s what I love about her. Marvellously, marvellously gratuitous.
What I dig about the Grant Wood is that the guy still looks like a dentist. One who’d regard an offer of crazy “spruce up your dental chair” loans as if the banker had offered to expose himself. The woman’s prone to fits, though.
The banks haven’t really gotten much better on the loans. I just refinanced my mortgage, which is to say that the note used to be my ex-husband’s, and is now all mine. While it’s true I wasn’t going in looking for a 100% interest-only jumbo loan, I did show up in the woman’s office looking for a loan of $120K on a teeny, near-poverty-level freelance income. Exactly the kind that ought not to get loans (in fact I’d expected to be turned down, and only went in because I had to make a show of trying). She also knows the state of the local economy. But nope, it was sign here, sign here. Tax forms from better times were all the income verification she wanted. Why? Because she intended to turn around and sell the mortgage ten minutes later.
Which prompted a series of panicked phone calls from the bank about a week after the signing. They’re so run off their feet signing mortgages there that no one had noticed the fact that I owe my ex a nice chunk of change, due when Small Girl is 23. Now, I know that this is not a problem; I’ve got other assets that could cover it tomorrow, if necessary. But the bank didn’t know about those, because it hadn’t asked. Furthermore, the bank doesn’t care, because the important thing is that the debt attaches to my house, even though there’s no lien. And that means my ex now has priority over the bank, which can’t come seize the house if I stop paying the mortgage.
Which means in turn that the bank can’t sell the mortgage. And that they’re freaking out. Initially this freaked me out, too, but when I talked to the nice, entirely mercenary and hardheaded woman, it came out that this is their problem, not mine. Also that if my ex doesn’t sign papers putting him second and them first, they’ll take him to court. So this is all very amusing. But even so, you know, they still aren’t being careful at all. The tighter lending restrictions just mean that if someone even smells like she can be hoisted over the bar with allowable number-massaging, they’ll seize her, sign, and throw the mortgage over the fence.
Re cake-eating, Henry: Yes, I know. (One of my favorite Brit-academic stories involves a postdoc in Connecticut who insisted on riding his bike everywhere and “got hit in the head with a Toyota.” He’s fine. Slightly shorter now, but fine.) But recall what went on here, and what it prompted us to do, when terrists showed up in American airspace. There’s been no shortage of terrists in places we regard as civilized for the last 40 years at least, and other places had lived with this with relative equanimity. (In fact I was working in the Palace of Westminster at a time when there’d be occasional muffled IRA _boom_s around, and nobody much minded them. I used to wave to the guards and go right around the metal detactors. No one bothered to investigate whether a 16-year-old American college girl in absurdly high heels might herself be a terrist.)(I’m sorry, Henry, there is no picture.) Anyway. After the WTC horror, people here were catatonic for years. Years. Every airplane overhead was a
Jap bomberterrist. You couldn’t go buy a tube of tartar-control toothpaste without making yourself a target. And we behaved delightfully abroad as a consequence.I turned on NPR this morning and promptly turned it off after a woman on a religion show breathed heavily at me, repeating questions about “what is important (in this economy)” and “what do we really need to live”, all obviously aimed at “we all need to pray more”. For our mental and spiritual health, you see.
I’m trying to remember my Latin … doesn’t “Nigella” mean “small and black”?
As for Brits being risk-averse: in fact we’re inveterate gamblers (betting on the time paint takes to dry, or that nobody will call in your loan).
the very poor, the insane, and British visiting faculty
I sense a redundancy.
I wonder how long the (relative) good will on all sides is going to last. Opel in Germany is deep in doodoo, and the German government is waffling over whether they can bail Opel out: the company belongs to General Motors and has given up their patents to GM years ago. GM, in turn, is supposed to have “provided some of Opel’s patents as collateral to the US Treasury in exchange for financial assistance”, according to the Financial Times.
Oh, and apparently profits were sent to GM, while losses were written off taxes in Germany, apparently. Get this (from the FT article):
Politically, Berlin will have to do something and Opel and GM know that. They are using the threat of job losses in an election year as a blackmailing device to get our support cheaply,” the insider said.
[In the US] GM has warned that without aid from several states it could run out of cash as early as next month, endangering up to 300,000 jobs.
There is just so much incredible stuff coming to the surface now, what’s that going to do for globalization?
I just found out that it’s do-do, not doodoo – didn’t actually know, just thought it couldn’t be dodo (as in the bird).
Stuff it, next time I’ll write poo.
@David: if you don’t know, then nobody does.
@Amy: multiply. Except that in my case they paid me $31000 for one quarter, and that was 1996; so perhaps ‘poor’ didn’t apply.
@ Steffi; I think we’re in for a massive bout of tariffs and protectionism, even though we know this is a bad thing (1930s? Anyone?) The cretins who protest against globalization will find the alternatives far worse in the long run. And as for
dodosdo-dos, you’re welcome in my salon to use that fine Anglo Saxon word shit. At least it’s honest. The other day I had a disgruntled rejected Futures author complain that another author (Norman Spinrad) had used the word ‘shit’. Cripes, I thought, I wonder what he’ll make of next week’s story, about lesbian android sex slaves. We Nature editors get our Olympian pleasures where we may.By the way, thanks to everyone on this list for keeping me sane this weekend. Mrs Gee went to a conference first thing Thursday and is back late tonight (Sunday). Sure, I’ve done this before, many times, but it doesn’t get any easier – being a single parent is knackering. Nothing especially difficult, but the total effect is relentless. Why is it that children are to punctuality what fish are to bicycles? Following the comments on this blog have kept me from ripping out the stair carpet with my teeth, So thanks, one and all.
This thread has been a welcome intermittent distraction from the grant proposal that I’ve been writing, since my return from the UK. The instructions are
nonexistentvery vague, wrt page limits and structure. I’m going for five pithy pages of proposal prose, and I’m presently procrastinating.I’m in my office at work, with my university-sanctioned desktop computer running Windoze, and my MacBook Pro running OS X and Papers (thank you thank you, whoever introduced Papers to NN … was it Martin?). This turns out to be an efficient way (for me at least) to write the background and experimental design sections. I’m proposing to use five different strains of genetically-engineered mice, the phenotypes for three of which are known intimately by me (I characterized the cell types in question in two of them, and both generated and characterized the third), and for the other two of which are pretty unfamiliar. Hence the need to keep referring to the original papers for the latter two GEM strains. Back to the mouse mines!
Why is it that children are to punctuality what fish are to bicycles?
Oo, they’re not stupid, they know who’s got the advantage. For a long time I lived for Sundays — the ex has SG Sat eve till Sun eve. Not that it was rest, but I did get to sleep late and then spend the rest of the day working in my pajamas. But eventually you find other people to fob the children off onto and some sanity returns. I may even be able to make a buck or two off the relentless need to have Someone Else looking after SG during the day.
I’ve got a friend who’d been
stupidlyselflessly playing single parent/writer while her husband went to graduate school in another state. This paragon of a husband came home one day, announced he’d won an eight-month fellowship overseas, and wasn’t she delighted for him? She said “Get out,” and now they’re divorcing. She’s had eight weeks now with no relief and is in the stage where you walk around with pudding in your hair and don’t notice because you’re trying not to cry. The lovely thing about going through this now, though, is that everyone’s on the desperation spectrum, so you don’t stand out, and you can stay home and hide under the covers or moon into the computer because there any jobs anyway.I still love Sundays, and the unemployment thing couldn’t have come at a better time. Between postings here have planned half the garden (is it worth trying to grow plums here, what with May frosts? Maybe not, but the ag extension people are encouraging, so I’ll try — and now I know why the fancy apple tree keeps falling over & needing staking, is a routine problem with that rootstock), waxed my legs (it didn’t hurt nearly as much as I’d expected), made bread dough, baked some apples, and have some minestrone on. While waxing, watched Bernanke squirm in front of Senate committee. He’s less than convincing, Bernanke is. My house smells lovely; it’s like a housewife lives here.
Henry, hang in there. I only want to read how you’re all coping with single parenthood (temporary or permanent) just swimmingly, else I’ll get depressed. Other half back 5 May. (And yes Amy, stupid is the word that tends to come to mind first).
@ Amy: I know about the smells of home cooking. Our breadmaker is always on the go, and come the fall there’ll be lots of apples. Home laundry, too, yields lots of pleasant, homely smells, and the smell of a golden retriever is comforting, unless it’s rolled in something nasty. I usually refrain from waxing my legs, though.
@ Steffi: I’m so sorry, how insensitive of me. I forgot you’re attached to a touring
rock starscientist. I knew a couple in a similar situation. He was an entomologist involved in a survey of Henderson Island in the Pitcairn Group, one of the most isolated spots on Earth and only accessible from Tahiti by sailing boat. She told me that his mail was addressed To (name), Pitcairn, via New Zealand. If it was via anywhere else, the mail never arrived.Henry, not insensitive at all! By the way, my husband isn’t a scientist – he’s the one in the family who knows how to get me my samples (when I still got those), that’s why I married him.
p.s. everyone assumes hubby’s a scientist because I am – that might actually be posting material some day :)
Good to know that your marriage has a sound, rational basis. None of that soppy lovey-dovey hearts-and-flowers stuff … :)
Mind you, I quite like flowers.
Well, that and he didn’t mind that his gloves were covered with my snot (I was using them without realizing they belonged to someone).
Ahhhh. Sweet.
and he didn’t mind that his gloves were covered with my snot
[splort!]
Good multi-purpose gloves, I’m guessing. ;-)
You’re up early, Kristi – I’m guessing a grant-proposal all-nighter. Good luck with it!
Mrs Gee arrived home around midnight, completely shattered after a nightmare journey home. I hope that the clean house, piles of clean laundry, kids’ lunchboxes and schooliform prepared, new baked loaf would garner me brownie points, especially after CISB09 …
I’m guessing a grant proposal all-nighter
Oh, no, I’ve learned my lesson. I finished the bulk of the proposal yesterday evening, and just need to put the finishing touches on it this morning, and take it to the post office (yes, an actual snail mail submission … weird!).
We switched to daylight savings time yesterday, so it’s officially an hour later than you might think. Not that everyone at work will have adjusted yet – probably a good thing that it’s spring break for most.
In supreme recessional irony I’ve been summoned for an interview at a local Kaplan University. Yes, the test-prep outfit, they’ve done the vertical-integration thing, so if you’ve failed to learn anything from the marvelous high-school textbooks I’ve helped write, paid the $4000 for the test prep course, and still bombed your SATs, you can always go back to Mama Kaplan for college. And — holy crap, that’s a lot of money. I’d expected they charged something in the community-college range, $1500/semester or so. No, as near as I can reckon, the students pay about $12K/yr. As I recall, tuition at the University of Iowa’s less than $8K/yr. That’s a pretty good premium on dumb.
$12K…I think that’s about the top of the range for federal student loans to undergraduates. Nice.
Amy, what are you interviewing for?
Good luck Amy! Let us know what happens, won’t you?
That’s a very good question. The email from the chair of general studies is cryptic. I’m assuming he wants an adjunct for composition, so if he doesn’t write back soon, that’s the demo he’ll get. But I don’t know whether this is a one-off, a “we don’t want to hire permanent faculty but can you teach 5/5 indefinitely for $30K/yr and no benefits,” a “we need someone to take the night classes nobody else wants,” or what. Well, I’ll go and find out.
What was that you said for the quarter, Henry? $31K? Well, you are the man to whom all scientists are more indebteder. What was that Iowa thing you mentioned a while ago, anyway — can you say? [wonders if Iowa City’s big enough to hold Henry Gee]
Oh, and thanks, Henry! Mixed blessing there, and it took me most of an hour to get back to the man — the pay may not cover wear & tear to the car, and no guarantee yet that I can take the classes even if I get the job. Evenings mightn’t work, might not have childcare. But it sure beats no job interview.
I had a comment to a thing far far up…. when some people remembered their au pair ;) I had an older women looking after me for a year or so. I guess that would be called nanny? (If we had lived closer to my grandparents maybe they would have stepped in? but now, it was this old lady. I of course, remember nothing of her…)
I really don’t mind cleaning my own house ..//…However, any residual inclination or temptation or release from societal sanction I might have had to hire a cleaner, has been eliminated after reading the chapter “Scrubbing in Maine”, in Barbara Ehrenreich’s book Nickel and Dimed.
When I read that book I got mostly annoyed with the difficulties of securing a rental contract to live somewhere. Something that was brought up again when I moved to Memphis. Thank goodness for working for a “famous institute” and not just being an immigrant [ and a poor academic ;) ]
I think I wouldn’t mind having someone to buy the spring/fall cleaning of the house from. You know the wipe windows, dust on top of bookshelves, behind the books, corners of the celing etc… although my bathroom is my own to clean. Something about that that just don’t work for me…
If I may say, re Ehrenreich — she’s telling the story from up top. If you’re starting from below, as I saw friends do, cleaning’s not a bad gig because if you’re not as good a girl as Barbara is, you do a shoddy job, move on, make the contacts, and take jobs off the books. Those ladies doing the hiring mostly can’t afford the $150/mo or whatever it is, and they don’t want to pay the franchise owners. So If there’s no $50K job in the cards for you anyway, it’s not so bad…though I wouldn’t want to try it in Maine. There aren’t enough rich/professional people in Maine. I’d go south to the NH/Mass border, all those desperate Boston commuters, they’re harried & have low standards.
Anyway. It’s like Jeane said (was it Jeane?): The only thing worse than being exploited is not being exploited. See posts above re adjuncting. I left the last adjunct job because the pay amounted to $3/hr. You get some genteel with your shabby, but it’s still not that hot a deal.
Nickeled and Dimed annoyed me at the time because it was news to so many people in academia. I imagine the stories are more familiar this time around, though.
Oo, it isn’t even comp. It’s “Intro to Reading”. Yes, college students paying $12K/yr, intro to reading. Well, the demo should be nice, anyway, can use the opening credits to The Sopranos.
@ Amy – well, it all sounds most mysterious… and money for old rope. If you can, take it. The Iowa thing rather depended on me being in the U. S. and A. the week before receiving cultural learnings at a conference in Cold Spring Harbor, but that didn’t happen. So I’m still in Blighty. God, Squiffy, I wish I was going with you.
Definitely brownie points Dr Gee, very pleased indeed to come home to see results of all your hard work, keep it up, thank you!
Kristi – a belated big thank you from myself and the Gees Minima and Minor for taking so much time to teach them to crochet, which they are still enjoying with great gusto! x
Good luck Amy!
@ Mrs Gee: Definitely brownie points Dr Gee, very pleased indeed to come home to see results of all your hard work, keep it up, thank you!
It’s the keeping it up. That’s what worries me.
Hullo, Penny! Glad to hear that Gees Minor and Minima are still working on their crochet. And I’m reminded that I’m supposed to be writing a pattern for the sea urchin.
I was knitting a sleeveless top (from one of Sally Melville’s design books, highly recommended) on the plane from Gatwick to Atlanta, and one of the flight attendants stopped to ask me what I was working on. “I wish I could knit”, she said wistfully. I nearly offered to teach her, right then and there, but she had to distribute the meals and drinks.
What amazes me is that they let you on the plane with knitting needles!
Henry, I checked in advance so that I knew which craft supplies I could and could not take in my carry-on bag. No scissors, and no metal knitting or crochet needles. Circular knitting needles with wooden or bamboo points (the type I had for my top) are OK, but the connecting “cord” can’t be too long (24" or less, I think).
There are a couple of knitting blogs that I read regularly, and when these bloggers travel, they almost always describe which knitting projects made it through airport security without incident.
I look around Nigella info and find pretty nice website about her nigella.com