Confessions of a Reluctant Recessionista

babysitter.’
    When I eventually arrived home that night, Jude was sitting on the sofa, talking on the phone and weeping. My first thought was that someone had died. Butwhen she looked up at me, she seemed to be smiling and weeping. I was confused. She put the phone down, leapt to her feet and flung her arms around me.
    ‘He’s asked me to marry him!’ she sobbed, squeezing me so hard I thought she might break a rib. ‘Matt’s asked me to marry him!’
    ‘He asked you over the phone? That’s not terribly romantic.’
    ‘Yes, it is,’ she replied. ‘He’s in Somalia, you see, and his car was shot at by rebels when he was driving from one of the refugee camps back to Mogadishu, and he thought he was going to die and all he could think,’ she sobbed, ‘all he could think was that he was never going to see me again and he just couldn’t bear it. So as soon as he got back into town he got hold of a satellite phone and he rang me.’
    ‘God, that is romantic,’ I said. I was welling up too.
    ‘Do we have any booze in the house?’
    ‘No, but the offie’s open for another … twelve minutes.’ I kicked off my heels, slipped on my trainers and sprinted all the way.
    I dragged myself into work the next day, my head aching and the rest of my body protesting at the lack of sleep. Jude and I had sat up drinking and chatting until three in the morning, planning the engagement party she was going to have when Matt returned from Somalia in a couple of weeks’ time. A triple-shot latte clutched in my right hand and a copy of Decanter magazine in my left, I staggered into the office to begreeted by Rupert and Olly, beaming at me as though they’d just won the lottery.
    ‘How are you this morning, Cassie?’ Rupert boomed.
    ‘I’m very well, thanks,’ I lied.
    ‘Lovely morning, isn’t it?’ Olly asked. Was it just me, or were they speaking unnecessarily loudly?
    ‘Do you know what day it is?’ Rupert asked.
    ‘Umm. Your birthday?’ I ventured.
    ‘It’s the end of your trial! Your three months are up!’
    ‘I hope you’re not about to tell me that my services are no longer required,’ I said. They both laughed heartily. And loudly.
    ‘Course not! We’ve got your permanent contract all drawn up. Thought we’d take you out to breakfast to celebrate.’
    They took me to Roast above Borough Market where I tucked into an extremely welcome smoked streaky bacon and fried egg butty accompanied by a glass of champagne (hair of the dog). Rupert laid the contract down on the table in front of me.
    ‘The money’s still not fantastic, Cassie. It’s not as much as you deserve – we really do appreciate how hard you’ve been working lately. But hopefully it won’t be long before we can offer you a bit more – if things keep going the way they are at the moment there are bound to be opportunities for you to move up in the company.’
    He was right, the money wasn’t fantastic, but I was just delighted to be back in full-time employment – and working at a place where I could see myself moving up the ladder in a year or two’s time.
    The permanent contract came at an opportune time, offering, as it did, four weeks of paid holiday, one day of which I opted to take that Friday so that I could accompany Ali to the property auction. It was held in a function room at the Royal Garden Hotel on High Street Kensington. Looking around the room, which was packed to the rafters, you wouldn’t have thought that we were in the middle of a housing market crash. There were hundreds of people there, and quite a few of them looked more like first-time buyers – young people, some with kids – than property investors or developers.
    Ali’s house, as I was already referring to it, was lot number twenty-two. The first batch of lots sold for well above their guide price.
    ‘What are we prepared to go up to?’ I whispered to Ali, who had found a chair and was sitting at the back of the room wearing her poker face: perfectly impassive.
    ‘I’ll go to three twenty,’ she said. ‘That’s the valuation the surveyor put on it. I do love the house but I’m not paying over the odds for it. In any case, anything above that and the mortgage would start to look a bit unmanageable.’
    I didn’t know how she could manage to be so calm about it. She was about to spend three hundred and twenty thousand pounds. My heart races when I spend a couple of hundred quid on a pair of shoes. But then she is used to dealing with big