Complete Lack Of Perspective Of The Day

From The Daily Telegraph:

Fergus and Jo Stewart live in Fulham with their four-month-old baby, Sebastian, but they are hoping to move to a Hampshire village near Basingstoke. They intend to swap their two-bedroom flat for a four-bedroom cottage, which is not an unreasonable ambition considering the buoyancy of the London market. They both grew up in the countryside and want their budding family to do the same.

Their flat, which has a big garden with a studio at the end of it, is listed at £750,000... Jo bought it in 2004 and feels very fortunate to have benefited from the big rises in prices.

"The market went crazy," she says. "I bought with my sister, who later moved out." Happily, Fergus moved in, and prices moved up. The estate agent handling the sale says prices in the area have risen by 90-100 per cent since Jo bought.

Yippee, hooray, free money from the magic money tree! She took a stake in society, invested wisely and built up capital! Nobody loses out from this, do they? We're all better off! Etcetera.

But there is a snag.

What snag? Surely if house prices go up we all become wealthier, and Jo especially, what's not to like? What could she possibly be complaining about?

Jo, a ski travel specialist, and Fergus, an account manager at Berry Brothers, have found themselves competing with lots of other young couples for homes on the Hampshire-Wiltshire border. The London dividend is powerful here.

"There are lots of families like us moving out," says Jo. "One house went in a fortnight for the asking price, and offers were only accepted from cash buyers."

I'm having one of those "Am I mad or are they?" moments. Does it seriously not occur to her for even one second that her difficulty in buying somewhere in her leafy Hampshire village is more than matched by the difficulty somebody else will have scraping together a cool three quarters of a million squid to buy her two bed flat with a big garden?