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