I had a bizarre experience yesterday. Not going out to see Star Trek, eating popcorn, going to Pizza Express, having a starter and a big pizza and paying less than £30 for 2 which considering how expensive everything in the world ever is, I thought was not too bad. Anyway, Star Trek, reasonably good film but don't recognise much of what anyone has said about it, and I think there's a huge plot hole.

No, different thing. I have for some time owed everyone a post on why I am absolutely certain that the recession is W-shaped, as I know you all look on me as an economic sage, the Nostradamus of the recession, if you will. Anyway I dunno if I can be bothered, it's all just so tediously obvious. Of course we'll recover a bit, the government is printing money like mad, interest rates are so low banks are paying people to borrow, and oil and stuff got cheap for a bit.

All of that reverses one way or another, and we find ourselves back in the situation we were in before, but worse - borrowing more expensive long-term, debt higher, imports more expensive as other countries recover. Pop quiz, for how many of the last 36 months have UK citizens borrowed less than they have paid back on their existing debt. Bear in mind there's been a 'credit crunch'. Would it surprise you that in fact in every month of the credit crunch, credit has actually risen? It's not a crunch - yet - just a slowing of the rate of growth. The big one where we actually have to start paying stuff back, rather than just running the national economy as if it was a 0% credit card balance transfer, that's all yet to come.

So, to the point. Yesterday I had a moment of self-doubt. I have for some time been saying that Spring would see stable or rising house prices thanks to all this free money, the psychology of the bull trap, and the general UK obsession with housing. I don't expect it to last, because unemployment is going up, long-term interest rates are going up, and house prices pretty much everywhere in the UK are still vastly higher than any sensible metric (local earnings, rental yield, whatever really).

However, yesterday I happened to spot a house and think "That's rather nice - I'd be willing to pay something close to the asking price for that place. Maybe I'm wrong, house prices have fallen far enough, and everyone is happy to pay this new reasonable valuation. I should probably go and take a look round it, although of course what I don't have is job security or willingness to stay in London for the amount of time it takes to make buying a house worthwhile".

I was a curious combination of relieved and disappointed today, on looking up the details, to find that the estate agent had been inundated with queries about said house, and corrected their listing to make clear that the price quoted is for a 50% share of the house, with hundreds of pounds a month of rent and service charges on top. I did think it was strange that someone was trying to sell a house leasehold, but London is a strange place!

Here's an unlikely, but not impossible, political history of the next six years.

UKIP do well this Thursday. Not brilliantly, but well. They hold their 2004 number of MEPs despite the UK's overall representation being cut, beat the Liberal Democrats convincingly, and at least run Labour close.

At the general election their vote share doubles again from 2005 to around 4.5%, and they save over 100 deposits, as opposed to 45 deposits last time. They take some distant second places in Conservative seats in the South-East and rural parts of the South-West, replacing the Lib Dems as the protest party in the countryside.

Despite losing some votes to his right, Cameron becomes Prime Minister with a healthy majority, though not a landslide - 40 seats overall. the Lib Dems end up with fewer seats than at present, and Labour are broken, turning to infighting between the Blairites and the left, and more importantly unforgiven for the current crisis by the vast majority of voters.

The W-shaped recession kicks in, as the Conservative government cuts spending savagely, and encourages higher interest rates to protect savers - this fails to bring in any new tax revenue as economic growth falls below expectations, and taxes have to rise to cover the growing cost of the government deficit. Reluctant to raise higher rate taxes, and committed to cutting inheritance tax, Cameron raises VAT to 20%, and increases national insurance costs on employers.

UKIP keep 'getting serious' as Nigel Farage's personal power is strengthened by the above electoral results. By mid-term, Cameron's Conservatives are polling around the 30% mark, and some 'rogue polls' show UKIP hitting 10%. Despite the Tories presiding over rising crime and a continuing chaotic immigration policy, the BNP are rudderless and disillusioned as they fail to make the promised advance, and lose their London assembly member.

Needing to curry favour in the EU to get the freedom of manoeuvre required on economic policy, Cameron gives in to his civil servants and signs the next EU Treaty - without the referendum polls show he would lose convincingly. He says it gives the EU no new powers, and calls it "game, set and match to Britain", in reference to Andy Murray’s success at Wimbledon 2012.

Disillusioned by Parliament and impoverished by the new allowances system, Crispin Blunt leaves Parliament to take up a vacancy as Britain's European Commissioner, vacated by Ken Livingstone’s return to the UK campaign trail for the London mayoralty. The Reigate by-election is on. Result 2010 as follows:

Conservative: 48%
UKIP: 16%
Lib Dem: 15%
Labour: 10%

The Conservatives select a Cameron A-list clone, committed to forcing the treaty through Parliament. UKIP select the telegenic grandson of former local MP and whipless Maastricht rebel George Gardiner. The by-election is fought as a referendum on the tax-raising, service-cutting Tory budget, and a proxy referendum on the treaty - a vote on whether to have a vote.

UKIP win their first elected member of Parliament, beating the Conservatives narrowly by 36% to 35%, and making a small fortune for a number of political gamblers. UKIP's poll ratings are transformed, and they are now regularly trading third place with the Lib Dems, depending on the pollster. A string of other by-elections across the south of England in the next 18 months see them beat, or come close to beating, the Tories, on the march in the way the Lib Dems were in 1993-7. In the 2014 Euro elections they top the poll, albeit with only 27% of the vote.

The 2015 General election is a messy campaign, with Cameron making all sorts of promises on renegotiating European treaties in an attempt to regain his core voters, but alienating a number of his Europhile MPs in the process - Ken Clarke resigns from the Cabinet and delivers a devastating speech, but Cameron hangs on. General election day rolls round, and the exit polls say:

Labour: 30%
Conservatives: 28%
UKIP: 18%
Lib Dem: 15%

Despite a clear win for ‘parties of the right’, the distribution of UKIP votes and the effect of relative turnout returns a Labour Party, fractious and unprepared for government, with a majority of 30 seats.

This is the Liberal Democrat Euro-election leaflet where I live.



I thought "Every Vote Counts" under the proportional representation we use for the Euro-election in question? Maybe it doesn't, but that's what I was told by, er, a Lib Dem.

The Tories have 'won round here' since the war, by the way. They have an MEP for the region, and Boris topped the disaggregated poll. The Lib Dems are also in coalition with them on the Council.

Hello! Thanks for all being nice about my stupid painful leg the other day. It is still quite stupid and painful. Yesterday I paid lots of money to see a doctor with the slightest clue about anything. He did some tests and decided there was nothing wrong with my bone (arf) so it's now fairly much narrowed down to

1) MTSS which is your classic 'shin splints' and should go away eventually though I'd probably want some physio and nonsense after it's gone on for this long.
2) CCS which is rather nastier and would probably involve cutting me up a bit if I want to exercise ever again. The more I look into causes and symptoms the more this feels like a better fit for what I have.
3) Something else really obscure that just happens to be causing the same symptoms, this is unlikely.
4) Or I'm mad and it's just all in my head. It doesn't feel like it is, it feels like it's in my leg.

Anyway, he's come up with some more tests that will narrow it down further, but I got bored of paying and asked if he could send me to an NHS hospital within any kind of sensible timescale. He said he might be able to do it within a month, which wouldn't be too bad. He's letting me know - otherwise I guess I just pay more money and get them done straight away.

Good weekend, though.

Or just one, really. On my way home from work I can get two buses - the 507, or the C10, for the first part of my journey. They both stop at the same stop, which is at one end of a straight road - I can see them approaching for up to a minute.

According to the timetable, the 507 runs "every 4-6 minutes", and the C10 runs "every 10-12 minutes". I would prefer to get the C10, as the interchange with the second bus is quicker at the other end. My preference extends to the fact that if I can see the C10 at the far end of the road before I am on the 507, I will wait, but if the 507 arrives with no sign of the C10, I will get on it.

Taking these factors into account, on what percentage of days should I expect to get the C10? I ask only because at the moment it seems to be around 10%, my instinct says it should be more like a third of the time, and my little statistical model in Excel says 29%.

As most of you know, I hurt my leg in the snow. Or, at least, my leg started hurting shortly after the snow, although I didn't fall over or anything, just stomped to work and back and slithered around a bit. Do you remember the snow - it was quite a long time ago now wasn't it? My leg, however, it still hurts. Shortly after it happened I went to the minor injuries clinic at Guy's, who told me that it could take up to two months for that sort of thing to pass, and that I should avoid walking for that time. Having a job and living in an upstairs flat, that isn't exactly easy. Still, I haven't been doing very much, and if you haven't seen me a great deal, that's part of why, especially if you've been having a thing at a place I can't get to by bus.

Anyway, it has now been the two months since that appointment, and it still hurts, so I have also been to see my GP, whose general attitude was "look on the bright side, you're not a horse". At least if I was I'd have three working legs. He has scaled up my likely recovery time from two months to six, though didn't offer any particular evidence on why I would get better in six months when I haven't in two. It seems most likely that I have this, although there has been a flat refusal on the part of all medical professionals to do any of the stuff usually common to that, in particular to rule out (properly, as opposed to saying "nah, that's not it" by looking at the outside of my leg) the possibility of a stress fracture, which obviously would lead to different treatment. Seriously, what do you have to do to get an X-ray around here these days?

So here I am, going to work and back by two buses because I can't comfortably make it to the tube station, getting sent home from Gloomy in a taxi because nobody trusts me to stand up or survive a bus journey, and generally being treated like I'm disabled, and getting fat because I am getting no kind of exercise. I think this is how so many people end up on incapacity benefits. I have a reasonably understanding employer when I'm late because I couldn't get moving or the buses didn't work, and a well-enough paid job in an expensive town that it's worth my while carrying on.

But when moving is painful, I think - what if, like eight years ago, I was being paid £250 a week after tax for a job I didn't like, and had the alternative of £90 a week of incapacity benefit, £30 of saving and other benefits (no need to pay bus fare, council tax benefit, etc) and £110 of housing benefit. If I could convince a doctor, why would I try? Maybe that's what I should say I'm going to do, and give the state a financial incentive to try and fix me, or at least tell me what's actually wrong, that would help, just knowing what exactly is broken.

Anyway, I'm reasonably well off so I'm clearly going to give up shortly and pay for private physiotherapy at the bargain price of £93 an hour, but I still don't think I should have to. I'm probably spending that per month already on anti-inflammatories, gels, ice therapy sprays and so on, though, just feel better handing it over £10 a time than all in one go. And I reserve the right to sulk, however many people have much worse stuff to deal with.

A Daily Telegraph reader complains today of their experience when trying to extend their mortgage borrowing with Northern Rock;

They wanted to know how much my husband and I currently earned after tax, what savings we had, and what we wanted the money for. It felt invasive – why should they know what I am going to spend my money on?

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1) I'm abroad next week - Sunday morning to the afternoon of Saturday following. Will have my phone but mostly not on, so text most sensible if anyone needs me.
2) a) I am still in fairly constant leg-based pain. This is tiresome, and if a week's holiday doesn't sort it out I am going back to see medical experts and shout at them. This means I am using buses to get around as I can't comfortably get to the tube station. This is hell, and making me angry.
2) b) I saw a lovely walking stick on Saturday but it was £85 so I'm waiting to see whether matters improve without. Incidentally, it is a matter of debate in the office, if you had a fairly mild leg injury and had a choice between a crutch or a walking stick, which would you go for?
3) If anyone wants to be our next door neighbour, this is pretty much across the road, and it's a new development with several to rent. There is, in my view, no way on earth they are going to get the asking price, so feel free to make cheeky offers and see what happens. I'd be fascinated.
4) The new member of the Bank of England MPC is a man who said in 2004 There are great strengths in the UK housing finance system. Lenders compete in a market where innovation in products has been impressive; loans are available to a high proportion of the population; homeownership has risen steadily for decades and has risen greatly amongst households at the lower end of the income distribution. So that's great, then.

For all that anything I say about the economic crisis tends to be prefaced with talks of plagues of locusts and falling frogs and tends to end in hail, darkness, and incurable boils, there's always someone prepared to be a great deal gloomier than me!

Our core headline forecast is that UK property prices remain between 17% and 39% overvalued based on fair valuation. Moreover, history has shown us that when property…which has experienced a price bubble corrects, the price tends to fall below fair value for a period of time, as confidence in that market remains low. Prices could fall a further 40-55% if the over-correction was as bad as the early 1990s in our view.

The bankruptcy of the UK is a very real probability as the UK Government is trying to stimulate a greater debt burden in a grossly indebted economy. We believe the scale of the macro imbalances in the UK means there is no prospect of a recovery in 2009 and we expect the UK to be mired in a deep recession through all of 2010.

Eileen Kinnear expelled from Harrow Conservatives.

Some of you were kind enough to do the first part of a survey to help with my father's degree a couple of weeks ago. If so, the second (shorter) half is here, would be good if you could do that too, cheers!

http://www.psyc.leeds.ac.uk/q/Leight2

I want to be as happy as this man.

A thought experiment, if you would indulge me. Let's suppose that you and an acquaintance were to go for a fortnight's holiday in Ascot. You have budgeted carefully, and each have £700 to spend on accommodation. On arriving in Ascot you go to the racecourse. You don't like gambling, so you just watch the world go by. Your acquaintance puts £100 on a 10-1 shot and it comes in.

Flushed with the success and his new wad of £1600, your acquaintance books in at the £150 a night Windsor Spa Hotel. You, as planned, go to your £50 a night bed and breakfast. Five days later, your acquaintance's business venture has not been going so well. Spending £150 a night, and losing around £100 a day at the racetrack, he is down to £400, with 10 days left to go. Worse still, the racecourse has temporarily shut down due to adverse economic conditions.

Your acquaintance, and his hotel, are both in trouble. However, you have a plan. You quite liked his big posh hotel room when you went to visit, and you do have spare money, because you budget carefully. So, accounting for the collapse in demand for hotel rooms, you suggest the following - he offers the B&B you are in £40 a night for your room for the remaining 10 days. You will then move in to his £150 a night room, paying £100 a night - busting your budget, but upgrading your holiday at a 30% discount.

Everyone reluctantly agrees to this, and you feel happy that your careful behaviour with your money has got you a nice holiday at a bargain price. Unbeknown to you, however, the hotel owners and your acquaintance have been to the Government to complain how unfair everything is, and how much hotels and horse-racing matter to the wider economy.

Bowing to this political pressure the Government steps in, reopens the racecourse, pays the difference between what your acquaintance can afford and what the owners of the posh hotel want for the room, and imposes a tax on careful budgets to make up the difference, meaning you are now £10 a day worse off than you were going to be when you first planned your holiday, and stuck back in the Bed and Breakfast.

1) How do you feel about this?
2) Next time you go on holiday to a racecourse, will you budget, or gamble?