The Sunday Times Homes 
section carried a piece with this title. City bonuses are again driving the housing market. Ripples from London will – well ripple out I guess. Hurrah I here you shout. We can talk about house prices again round the dinner table. We will console ourselves that everything is ok once more. We have the comfort of rising prices. But the reality is that higher prices are only of paper value. Unless you trade down they are meaningless. Kids wont be able to get onto the housing ladder and the gap between rich and poor will grow. Of course re-mortgaging means a consumer splurge can start again and we can go back to being turbo-consumers. So what was all the fuss about? The boys and they are almost exclusively boys in the City can take home squillions and bring the whole economy down again in a few years. Meanwhile our politicians look on and say nothing can be done. Oh dear!
Personally, I think the answer may just lie in advoiding dinner parties.
There are far too many of the things in London – and too many Sunday lunches. If people stopped sitting around making themselves unhappy by listening to their more successful contemporaries, they could be doing something useful and interesting like a woodwork or cookery course or mountain biking or something which would mean that they would be a lot less aware of what they did or didn’t have.
How many of these dinner party guests are your “friends” anyway?