LONDON CALLING:It's not just jaundiced journalists taking pleasure in the UK housing slump - Joe Public is also enjoying other people's misery

MEA CULPA, mea culpa, mea maxima culpa . . . I have just read the wise words of Kirsty Allsopp, British Channel 4's own property poppet, and I now realise the error of my ways. Not only is there no property slump but, even if there were, it would be the fault of reckless hacks who are talking down a perfectly healthy market.

"The only conclusion I can draw is that every journalist in the country rents," she pronounces imperiously, choosing to ignore the tidal wave of feel-bad stories issued by financial institutions, "and has a vested interest in the property market falling through the floor".

I can't work out if her hauteur is rather magnificent - the Noughties equivalent of reassuring everyone that it'll all be over by Christmas - or just plain self-serving battiness.

In the past week, we have been told the following: that, according to the IMF, the UK housing market is overvalued by almost 30 per cent (but not as badly overvalued as Irish property - phew); that prices will fall by 10 per cent (the IMF again - do they have nothing better to do than to worry about the fate of the British semi?); that there are now only 40 per cent of mortgages available compared to a year ago and the final 100 per cent deals have now been withdrawn with no prospect of the Bank of England rate cuts being passed onto the rest of us; that prices have fallen an average of 2.5 per cent in the past month and anyone with less than 20 per cent equity in their home faces the very real prospect of negative equity in the next couple of years.

While it's true that there is a certain strain of reporter that relishes a bit of hair-tearing and chest-beating, I'm not convinced that the consensus of bad sentiment can be put down entirely to biased coverage by my jaundiced colleagues.

And what is stranger is the British appetite for this gloom. The nation can't get enough of other people's misery to judge by the "Have Your Say" panels at the end of every website news article - they are positively gleeful at the fate of those nursing huge buy-to-let losses or facing repossession.

"As for banks being the unilateral bad guys, spare me - the greedy buyers/investors were only too happy to lie about their self-certified mortgages, or flip properties, or put a lick of paint over a dump to resell at an unhealthy profit to the next sucker," reads one of the calmer outpourings on the London Times's blog.

Doom-mongering journalists? I think Kirsty is going to have to deal with a whole swathe of pundit-hating Joe Publics first.

" Elsewhere, the nation's ability to take adversity on the chin looks in a critical condition following a report in the Financial Times that many investors of property funds are investigating the possibilities of suing their financial houses.

After some record-breaking deals in the first few months of 2007, many commercial property investments suffered significant losses towards the end of the year and some, such as AXA, Scottish Widows and Scottish Equitable, froze accounts in February effectively locking investors in for the next few months to stop mass withdrawals.

It is this move that the investors are seeking to challenge as they are forced to sit and watch their dividends vanish. It is not, they claim, that they thought that they were onto a one-way bet but that they were not informed that they could be locked in that is the root of the action. The advice of some extremely expensive silks has been sought.

"As a rule, the worse the situation, the more people are prepared to spend trying to make good their losses," said one lawyer from a prestigious London practice.

" The headline news this past week is that according to Halifax Bank stats, house prices fell by 2.5per cent in the past month. Except they haven't: in the West Midlands, prices have dropped by 5 per cent but, amazingly, prices rose by 1.6 per cent in London. Even more surprisingly, the Halifax's analysts are predicting modest rises over the next year.

The smart money isn't sticking around to test this theory - there are reports of coffers being emptied in order to invest in . . . Zimbabwe now that Robert Mugabe's government seems about to be finally ejected and before the country stabilises enough to see significant property inflation (currency inflation runs at a breath-taking 400,000 per cent). Harare Calling anyone?