Had the woman who put in an offer for our house just over a year ago gone through with it she would now be sitting on a large paper loss. Had we accepted the seemingly massive reduction her young brother, who worked in financial services, suggested we would be debt free and living somewhere smaller that we owned out right and she would be nursing a much smaller paper loss. In either case, I would probably have been feeling fairly smug right now at my foresight and financial acumen. As it is I feel, in John Brunner’s phrase, “Like a dead leaf in the gale.” Why then, in a peculiar way, do I, at this time in our history, feel that this might be a happier place to be?