£83,000

Yep £83,000, thats the minimum salary my local paper the Cambridge News announced you need to earn in Cambridge if you want to buy a house these days. Then I hear on TV today that some national hotel chains only pay about £6.90 per hour. I think that works out around £14,000 a year and you have to wonder where those earning less than the aforementioned larger salary live.

Well yes rented accommodation but even that's ridiculous in Cambridge. So where then further out and then even further. Yep and so logically you have the next issue all those lower paid staff need to travel into the city to work and lo and behold what do we have traffic held up all over the place and believe me its worse in Cambridge than anywhere else. Do all cities say that!

Anyway apparently one way round mortgages and rents is to extend your house and setup granny or the kids in an annexe. Last November there was a headline in the local paper; "Rise of the Waltons tribe as generations live together", together with a nice picture of the old Walton clan on the porch.

Its a growing trend apparently, well I can see the nice bits of this with families living together and helping each other out but wait a minute isnt this how we used to live before we got on our bikes and looked for work! Not completely perhaps but surely it shows the system is struggling and if not the system certainly the people living in it.

Then lets just go back to the traffic. In Cambridge there is a group or something called City Deal which is trying to improve housing jobs and you've guessed it the traffic which is worse than anywhere else or have I said that before? Ideas are flying about all over the place and new groups of residents against some proposal or other are being launched like falling leaves, which leads me onto the prospect of trees beside roads being cut down to make room for bus lanes etc etc. Then there have been proposals for tunnels under Cambridge and monorails and of course a congestion charge. Did I mention the gates on key access routes to regulate the traffic getting in?

Well nothing is right of course especially if it might mean houses get noisier. But then lets go back to the start if houses weren't so expensive perhaps people on lower salaries could live in the the place and there might just be less traffic or driving about.

But then what do I know or most other folk we just put up with it and moan, does it sort anything out no but it makes you feel better, roll on the next proposal.