Woe is Me!!!

It’s Monday morning and not easy to find reasons to be cheerful after yesterday. Last week’s brutal (but in my view, necessarily so) budget sets us up for a good few years of austerity which indeed applies to our footballing ambitions after a whimpering exit from the World Cup. An exit so bad, that despite having a perfectly good goal chalked out against our bitterest rivals, you can’t find a single England fan who begrudged the German players their win.

We have one of our most successful international businesses ever, seemingly responsible for creating the worst environmental disaster on record and defending themselves about as usefully as a chocolate fireguard. You may consider you have good reason to bemoan being English at this point in time and after all, we’re famous for whinging, so I expect a couple of weeks of thoroughly miserable headlines on the front and back pages will follow before normality returns.
 
The main property news this week is that Countrywide, the UK’s largest property business, has acquired Hamptons International. Locally you will be more familiar with brands that Countrywide already own but still market under their original names of Taylors and Bairstow Eves. In theory, this seems a strange fit but I assume they’ll retain the Hampton’s branding for the executive homes properties.
 
Marketing of executive homes is a thorny subject as far as I’m concerned and the latest Imagine TV episode will highlight the issues that relate to this particular element of the market. Click on the video link on our home page if you’d like to find out more.
 
To finish, I’ve had to find something positive. The cat who has had two prosthetic legs fitted after he came off second best in an argument with a combine harvester merits a mention, but even more inspiring was hearing America’s two richest men, Warren Buffet and Bill Gates, have committed to philanthropy for the rest of their days. That is to say they are investing almost the entirety of their time and wealth in good causes from now through to death and beyond in terms of apportioning their estates. Both are multi–billionaires, who for me have set an admirable lead by which financially successful people in business, entertainment, sport, politics could do well to follow if they want to leave a truly inspiring legacy.