Concrete Pencil: House price talk makes me sick

I really thought the global financial crisis had put a stop to all that hideousness, although deep down I'm sure I knew the good times couldn't last for ever.

I figured we'd get longer than this. I hoped at least we'd be free for a year or two more of the incessant, awful, pointless, obsessive nonsense that people of my age and class rattle from their mouths in every waking minute about buying and selling property.

Just for the record: We are all going to die, sooner than any of us would hope. When you die you can't live in a house any more. One more bedroom at £40k less than you would have paid three years ago does not make you a happier or better person. 

Now, I'm sure the things I talk about get very boring very quickly. But I don't think I can ever hope to reach the level of tedium attained just before the property market went bust. 

The signs are there. Stand on the DLR and listen to people on their phones. Even two months ago, they were talking short term things: what are we having for dinner? Can you pick me up something from Spar? What did Lovefilm deliver?

Now it's creeping back. Two calls in every three are: "I don't know if it's too far a walk from the station for you, I haven't seen it yet but the area's really going to be up and coming thanks to the new station and now's a perfect time to buy."

You know it's true; you've heard it too; you see it coming. 

Within the twelvemonth, it'll be all you hear. "We bought it when prices were lowest and now we can't accommodate all the viewings but we're going to hold off another month and wait for prices to rise again."

If the good unintended consequence of the Big Panic was that we didn't have to put up with this toss all day, every day, from everyone, everywhere, the related unexpected downside of the scale of the thing may have been that we lost sight of the fact that property speculation was part of the problem.

Nine (this tasty acronym stands for Now I'm No Economist, and can be merrily adapted to include biologist, doctor, psychiatrist - as in Ninp) but people puking on about house prices all their lives have a hole in their soul the size of £400,000 mortgage.

Now, I'm no economist, but the housing bubble was fuelled from the bottom up by bad mortgages, wasn't it?

Is it wishful economistising to suggest then that the crisis was in part caused by these buy-to-let, Homes Under The Hammer conversational criminals who borrowed and bought all of London and are now boring you and I again?

Tell me that it was, and let us together find a punishment suitable.