Tell me aboot rising mortgage rates. I was one of the 18-percenters.
Dire predictions house owners might have to shell oot as much as 6% on their repayments by spring next year. A horrendous jump which could see millions of peer folk having to consider selling up.
Like feel bairns, PM Lizzie and her quasi-chancellor Kwasi dreamt up their ruse in secret, ca’ed it a “fiscal event” to smuggle it past the budget police, then tottered off giggling, to wait until the whole caboodle went kaput. Success.
They rewarded the rich and punished the poor. Where’s Robin Hood when we need him?
My mortgage is long paid off, but I deeply sympathise with everyone facing a sickening monthly hike. My first man and I bought oor hoosie in 1974. It hadn’t been lived in for seven years, so we got it for a song and had to gut it. However, come the early 1980s, we bumped up the mortgage to pay for an extension, just when inflation went mad and the rate hit a whopping 18.45%.
Luckily, we were both working; we got through it, but millions of others didn’t. Thanks a lot, Mrs Thatcher, whom I suspect is Ms Truss’s role model.
Come the 1990s; new man, new extortionately expensive hoose, rates still over 10%, each month paying oot more in interest than the loan.
North-east or North Pole?
Ancients like me may have now paid up their mortgages, but oor fixed pensions are facing a sair fecht this winter. One of the bossier and more sensible in a pucklie of us in touch for years has set up something like an oldiesnet in a WhatsApp to get us fired up and motivated to slash oor bills.
Aboot 10 of us were vying to see fa’d be the first and last to switch on their cintral heatin’. I was second, having to push the button one Sunday teatime aboot three weeks ago, when I’d been to Codona’s with my quine and grandtoots, freezing to the giblets watching them having the three-hour time of their lives. (The bairns insisted I’d warm up on the pirate boat. I declined, suspecting their motives.)
All the app chat the past two weeks has been about how to ward off the oncoming freeze. From the thin goonies we sweated in during the heatwave to flannelette jammies.
The big question is what time to change into full Arctic evening wear to beat the radiators? I kid you not, some of my ladies are stripped off and muffled up even before Grumpian News at 6pm.
A delivery gadgie, dressed in T-shirt and shorts like it’s still July
I’m more of an 8pm kinda gal. But Monday was particularly chilly. Beginning to shiver, I launched my beat-the-heat campaign around 6.30pm, enveloping masellie in a huge duvet dressing gown, complete with hood, I’d bought from Amazon yonks ago but always reckoned too daft to wear. Spik aboot toastie.
Natch, comes a ring on the bell 7pm. A delivery gadgie, dressed in T-shirt and shorts like it’s still July. He looked so shocked. Like he’d accidentally delivered to the North Pole.
Moreen Simpson is a former assistant editor of the Evening Express and The Press & Journal, and started her journalism career in 1970
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