What should we make of the Spring rebound in the London property market? According to Nationwide prices were almost 5% higher in June than in April. Some agents say there has been a 10% bounce off the bottom in parts of the capital. It is typical of this most enigmatic of recessions.

On the one hand there is the Private Fraser tendency: otherwise sober commentators who get their kicks from cheering the country with their "we're all doomed, doomed I tell you" warnings. For them it is either the worst downturn since the War, the Thirties Depression, for 100 years or since the Great Flood. I don't know and neither do they.

On the other there are the anecdotal stories from the frontline of the real economy, which paint a very different picture. One household name luxury retailer told me this morning that like-for-like sales are up 20% this year. And not just in London where you might expect the tourist dollar to artificially inflate takings. No, he told me the picture was the same all over the country. In fact the strongest performance of all is in Manchester. It is the same story on fine dining, where Gordon Ramsay, for all his travails, is still doing record business at his London restaurants.

You don't spend that sort of money on what are essentially fripperies, if you really think that it is time to hunker down. So why the discrepancy? One theory of mine is that it is simply so long since the last recession that no-one under 40 can remember it as a fully fledged participating member of the economy. They still don't quite believe what the eco-Cassandras are telling them. They're used to spending easy money and can't give up the habit when they don't have to.

The over-40s, by contrast, grew up in an era of perpetual economic crisis and are more easily persuaded that the bad times have returned. The length of the upturn also meant that many people were able to accumulate such huge cash resources that they are essentially recession proof in a way that far fewer were in the Eighties and early Nineties.

Don't forget also that 93% of the working population still have jobs and of those perhaps a quarter are substantially better off because of falls in mortgage rates. Again that is in contrast to recessions of yore.

None of this is particularly scientific. Every recession has its own peculiar characteristics. If the early Eighties was a failure of industry, the early Nineties a failure of property, then this one if perhaps a failure of banking. Whether that makes it easier to contain and recover from only time will tell. Perhaps another Dads Army catch-phrase is the appropriate response: Don't Panic

Regina v Darling, or more likely v Osborne, will be one of the more fascinating departmental spending struggles of the coming years. Next summer the Queen's senior courtiers lock horns, or perhaps tiaras, with Treasury mandarins over the future funding of our Head of State.

It could be a defining moment for how Britain wants to run its Monarchy. The annual Civil List, the public income used to pay for the Queen's daily costs, mostly staff salaries, has been set at £7.9 million for the past 20 years. It now only covers about half of her spending, the short-fall made up from reserves. Those reserves are almost depleted now and will be down to just a few million by the time the Queen's next 10 year financing cycle starts in Spring 2011.

Just to keep the Queen's way of life at current levels would mean increasing the Civil list by at least £7 million and more realistically probably £10 million a year.

The claim will come against one of the bleakest public spending backdrops in British history. It also comes in a new era when hostility to the taxpayer funding the lifestyles of public servants is more intense than ever.

The Queen cannot be compared to "flipping" MPs of course. The public expects a little Majesty from their Monarch, but prefers humility from their political representatives. Nonetheless the case for the extra money is going to be an unbelievably hard one to make.

If anything the public mood could harden over the next two years as the grim reality of deep public spending cuts takes hold. It was anger over alleged Royal profligacy that forced the Queen to start paying tax on her income during her annus horribilis in the last recession in 1992.

We could be approaching the moment when the Monarchy takes another lurch towards a pared down Scandinavian model. Less Majesty it may be but the Queen has finely tuned political attenae. If the alternative means stoking up Republicanism she will happily accept more tupperware and less flummery at the Palace.

They say that City bonuses are back. They've even invented an acronym for it - BAB. I would coin a different one - BAND or bonuses actually never disappeared.

Should we weep or cheer that the Abbey, Alliance & Leicester and Bradford & Bingley brands are receiving corporate euphanasia at the hands of their Spanish owner Santander?

There will inevitably be sadness that names that have been around so long are being killed off without sentiment like so many unwanted kittens.

For those of us of a certain vintage, "Get the Abbey Habit" is as much part of our televisual growing up as "Only Here for the Beer" or "Tell 'Em About the Honey Mummy." But that does not justify Abbey's continued existence. In all probability these three former building socities signed their own death warrants the  very second their boards decided that life as a stick-in-the-mud worthy mutual was too dull and the racy, world of the stock market was the future.

In many repects it is far harder to work up any regret about the passing of a bank.  Alliance & Leicester affords far less emotion than a fondly remembered sweet. I still talk about Opal Fruits and Marathon bars like an old bore who insists on translating decimal prices into pounds, shilling and pence. But who still thinks of HSBC as Midland Bank? Nobody, except perhaps the former chief executive.

HSBC is infact a good example of how the waters close over dying brands very quickly. Can anyone other than a banking anorak (not someone I'd want to be sat next to at a wedding) now remember Midland's logo (a griffin) and slogan ("the listening bank"). Indeed HSBC has had a good credit crunch, its size and conservatism standing it in good stead in difficult times. Santander may be foreign and unfamiliar to us now.

But in five years time we will in all probability have forgotten why we ever got the Abbey habit and who on earth were poor Messrs Bradford and Bingley (deceased).

Three big banking names to be wiped off high street

Banking bosses have lining up to flagellate themselves this week and point out just how scratchy the hair shirts they are wearing are to naked skin more accostomed to Jermyn Street cotton.

All well and good and the public expect nothing else. But it is not just the banking fat cats who have been pocketing huge cash bonuses in recent years. Across corporate Britain the bonuses have been showered on directors over the past five years on a scale that would have been undreamed of to an earlier generation of plutocrats. By 2007 the average package of a FTTE-100 chief executive was £2.5 million, of which only £780,000 was base pay, the rest bonus and other incentive payments.

So at a time of soaring unemployment and plunging workplace morale is it not right that Britain's industrial bosses should also consider waiving their bonuses even if they have been well deserved? I put this point this week to the head of one of Britain's household name companies.

A thoughtful man, he pondered for a second and said his board had given consideration to such a gesture but thought it unlikely. He picked up a bonus of more than £500,000 last year but argued that almost all his bonuses and a large part of his salary had been reinvested in shares, so he was really not so well off as it appeared.. Friends in the private equity world laughed as his meagre rewards he said. He had worked extraordinarily hard, helping to turn round a business that was struggling before he took the helm. As they say in the L'Oreal ads, he was worth it. He had given up weekends, sacrificing seeing his children play sport and the other pleasures of parental life. In addition, he said, giving up bonus would send the wrong signal to the labour market, detering potential high flyers from joining the business.

Finally he argued whether giving up bonus would actually make any difference to how the workforce viewed the boardroom.

He is a decent man and a fine leader of the company in question. However, I disaagree fundamentally with his analysis. It is the thinking of a different world order.

Even before the events of the past six months there were growing signs of cynicism and even outright hostility to free market capitalism.

Virtually every major consumer business - from the high street banks to British Telecom -  was increasingly seen as screwing the end customer while rewarding shareholders and directors with ever more lavish returns.

The banking collapse and the resulting recessionary jobs fall-out will only stoke the anger, which politicians and yes, the media, are not holding back to exploit. It is time for the higher echelons of capitalism to make - as they said in the trenches - a futile sacrifice.

Most of the bosses of the FTSE-100 companes will have enjoyed many years of bumper remuneration growth. To give up one year's bonus is not seriously going to compromise the life-styles of any of them. But at a time of massive fear about job prospects it would send a hugely important signal to the rank and file, particularly if they are going to suffer pay freezes and redundancies. On his final point he could not have been more wrong. It is difficult to think of a single action that could do more to restore the reputation of Britain's well heeled corporate elite.

First inflation was the bogey. Then deflation. Now there are already the first vague stirrings of inflation making a come back.

How come? Nothing to do with the underlying state of the economy, which is as bombed out as ever.

No, it is collapse in the value of sterling and the knock-on effect that has for imported goods that is just starting to make itself felt.

Anything made in Japan - and that includes a huge proportion of the TVs and cameras we buy in Britain - is now earning their manufacturers only half as many yen as 18 months ago.

Even with falling costs of production that cannot go on forever. It won't happen immediately but as the boss of John Lewis Andy Street admitted to me, it seems a racing cert that some of that will have to be passed on to consumers come next Christmas.

Talking of racing, Hornby, the makers of Scalextric and the world's best toy train sets admitted today that the fall in the pound is killing its profit margin and that higher prices may be inevitable.

Another high profile victim is the fashion group Mosaic, which owns the Karen Millen and Oasis brands among others. It lost all its currency hedging cover when the Icelandic banking system went down and is now horribly exposed.

The trouble is that many of its rivals will have protection in place, probably through to the summer. It will impossible to push through prices increases when competitors are still discounting like crazy to keep shoppers coming through the doors.

There are other inflationary risks. At some point the oil price will bounce, possibly triggered by some nasty international incident affecting one of the major producing countries.

Although interest rates are likely to remain low for some time to come, when they do start to rise many home owners will be saddled with horrible interest rates. The average tracker is currently at 2.36 per cent above the Bank of England base rate. That's fine when the base rate is 1.5 per cent. But if it returns to more historically normal levels of say 4 to 5 per cent that translates to an mortgage rate of around 7 per cent or more.

There are so many bear traps in this unprecedented downturn that the authorities hardly know which way to look. They had hoped that inflation would not be one of them. But the chances are it will be.

It dawned on me yesterday that it is almost half a lifetime since I bought my first LP. (Kids, this was the recorded music technology format squeezed in between wax cylinders and compact discs - or as my eldest son calls them, "those really big black CDs.")

It was, and I'm not afraid to admit it, Abba's fourth album Arrival. This seminal moment came in the post-drought Autumn of 1976 and funded by a £2 record voucher received for my 11th birthday.

While most of my school friends were casting aside aside the prog rock and glam favourites of the early Seventies in favour of the nascent Punk revolution I was very much an Abba man - or boy.

(It could have been worse, my first single - like an LP but smaller, children - was Boney M's double A side Rivers of Babylon/Brown Girl in the Ring, bought mainly because two chart releases on one disc seemed really good value for money.)

Even at their mid Seventies peak Abba was not a particularly cool choice for a lad growing up on the wrong side of the tracks in, er, leafy Cookham in Berkshire. Don't sneer, it could be pretty nasty around chucking out time at the Copper Kettle tea rooms, actually. The Clash, the Damned and the Sex Pistols had a much better playground image.

But great bands though they were and important figures though John Lydon, Joe Strummer are, (no, not Captain Sensible) they have all been eclipsed by the naff Swedish quartet. Remarkably, it is Benny and Bjorn who rank alongside Lennon & McCartney and Jagger & Richards as the greatest song writing duos of the Sixties and Seventies.

And I still love the music dammit. It is not supposed to be like this. You are meant to grow out of your pre-pubescent musical choices and graduate to trad jazz and Gregorian chants. Like few other bands ever before them, with the possible exception of the Beatles, their music is starting to leach down into the next generations. And up into the one above. We watched the Mamma Mia DVD on Christmas Day and the age range of the viewers was 16 to 82. I wanted the Singalong version but perhaps sensibly was outvoted. There are limits.

Mamma Mia is now officially the most successful ever movie at the British box office and it is by far the best selling DVD. So it's not just me.

Somewhere in the attic that dusty old Arrival CD still nestles in a box between Pinky and Perky's Greatest Hits and the Geoff Love Orchestra Plays the Bond Themes. Naff it may have been but there cannot be many debut album buys from the Seventies that have stood the test of time like Arrival.

But even the greats have their off days. Even as an 11 year old I cringed at the Side A excrescence of Scandinvian cheese entitled Dum Dum Diddle. How that got on the same collection as three classics of the quality of Dancing Queen, Knowing Me Knowing You and Money Money Money, only the great Swedes themselves will ever know.

YOU CAN tell the victims of tracker mania. I know. I'm one of them. The symptoms manifest themselves early each month: on the dot of noon.

Sufferers gather round a screen or radio in silence then pump the air with their fists shrieking, "I love you Mervyn King." A primitive urge sends them jabbing at the keys of a calculator while clutching their last mortgage statement. It is not an edifying site.

The other financial affliction in this strange new world we live in is fixed rate anxiety syndrome. Its victims twitch uncontrollably at the mention of the Bank of England. They wander around in a depressed trance groaning repeatedly: "Five years at 5.99 per cent. Why....why?"

Not since interest rates briefly and surreally hit 15 per cent on Black Wednesday in September 1992 have interest rates loomed so large in our lives.

Those who grabbed the last of the discount trackers in the summer of 2007 are now basking in the glow of the lowest mortgage rates they or any other borrower has ever known, in some cases, remarkably, just 0.99 per cent.

But will it work? Will the hundreds of millions of pounds of extra spending power unleashed each month by the Bank of England's increasingly desperate throws of the dice make a jot of difference. There are certainly no shortage of enticements to spend. They may have moaned about it but retailers are pushing the VAT cut for all they are worth. In the Nando's Chicken Restaurant I was lucky enough to visit this week with my children they are calling it Very Attractive Transaction. It will probably take more than that to get me back but I take the point.

Bosses at John Lewis say they have seen a dramatic surge in sales of big ticket items on which the 2.5 per cent cut actually adds up to something worth having.

The sales on the High Street are extraordinary. The old rules of retailing which said you did not start discounting until Boxing Day have been thoroughly trashed. Stores are certainly busy on their discount days. But many are fighting for survival. The money they can persuade shoppers to part in December may mean the difference between a mere loss and full scale administration in the New Year.

Of course shoppers will spend at Christmas, even the benighted fixed rate fall guys. But wait until January.

The problem is that the more money is thrown at consumers the more they want to squirrel it away. They are scared. The combined value of Britain's residential property was estimated at £5.8 trillion at the start of the summer. It is not unreasonable to assume that this has fallen by close to £1 trillion since then.

The nation may not yet be in negative equity - Britain's collective personal borrowing stands at around £1.5 trillion - but its Loan to Value ratio is plummeting. Just as soaring property prices encouraged consumers to borrow, spend, and borrow again for a decade, so the loss of £1 trillion of personal wealth in six astonishing months has triggered a drastic reappraisal of priorities. Even people in relatively safe jobs who are better off because their mortgage rate has gone down are, as it were, dumping Waitrose for Morrison.

The monthly tracker mania "high" does not last long. The extra money might be welcome on paper. But for many of us it is cash we dare not spend.

Is the Ross/Brand scandal the BBC's Jo Moore moment? Like the notorious "good day to bury bad news" e-mail, it was a lapse that revealed the darkness behind the facade - with devastating consequences.

In the case of Jo Moore, we saw the sheer amoral cynicism of the New Labour's news manipulation obsession. For the BBC the Andrew Sachs interview casts an ugly light on the broadcaster's declining standards and the way in which commercial priorities means "talent" now runs the show.

Like the Jo Moore incident on 9/11, the outrage has taken a few days to build, almost as if people could not initially believe what they read they were so aghast. Another parallel is the way in which the initial apologies were slow and inadequate. Only when the scale of the anger became clear were more abject expressions of regret forthcoming.

One reason people feel so upset is because most regard the BBC as one of the country's finest institutions, overwhelmingly a force for good.

How can an organisation responsible for Planet Earth, Cranford, Life on Mars, Dr Who and, of course, Fawlty Towers, also churn out this offensive bilge? Jonathan Ross earns a reported £6 million a year, that's £120,000 a week, or around £17,000 a day. I don't know what Andrew Sachs was paid for his unforgettable portrayal of Manuel, but I'd be surprised if it was more than Ross's daily rate.

Put it another way. The BBC collects £3.368 billion a year from the licence fee and pays 0.178 per cent of it to Ross. The licence is £139.50 per household and 0.178 per cent of that is around 25p. Perhaps viewers who are particularly outraged that they pay the wages of the man who so insulted Andrew Sachs should withold the 25p Ross levy next time they are asked to cough up. That would send a message to the hierarchy. Not in my name, Mark Thompson, not in my name.

I'd like to think - and perhaps I am being woefully self-deluding here - there are not too many people in the world in whom I inspire outright loathing. Unfortunately, for a journalist who writes about consumer affairs, in my case the list is headed by Sir Philip Green. The great rag trade knight (don't dare call him mister)  and I have not hit it off since I wrote what was only a mildly less than totally flattering profile some years ago when he bought Arcadia. I still wince when a I recall the phone-call I took from Britain's favourite tax exile that night on my mobile. It ended with the journalistic equivalent of the total breaking of diplomatic relations between him and all the organisations he controls and the Standard. Fortunately there was eventually a thawing and a year or so later I spoke to Sir Philip about his financial results. Again, a reasonably balanced piece followed (or so I thought) and again the blistering "hairdryer" rant. The same once more when we (or more specifically I) reported the £1 billion dividend he paid himself and his family from Arcadia profits. I'm sorry, but there comes a point when a chap has to ask himself where a relationship is going wrong. I am now cast into the outer darkness. When Sir Philip recently got in touch with the Standard about the very solid results from his empire he specifically asked that Jonathan Pr*** (modesty prevents me from writing his nickname for me but suffice it to say it rhymes with Sir Francis Crick) should not be allowed to write them up. Fair enough but I do wish the great man would let bygones be bygones. It really isn't worth a billionaire's time to get so worked up about a humble scribe. No-one bows in admiration more than me for Sir Philip's many achievements. I don't ever expect to be invited to one of his extraordinary birthday bashes. But given that he might be the only retailer left standing when the recessionary dust has settled it would be nice if we could at least talk. Sir Philip, give me a call some time.