Well that's a welcome piece of news, I must say. While all around us global corporations are collapsing like rails of shirts, international banks are begging for spare change for a cup of tea, and interest rates are at their lowest for 300 years, the price of houses is going up. Halifax reports that house prices in January — for the first time in 11 months — rose 1.9 per cent.

This is, obviously, of particular interest if, like me, you've just moved into a new house you can ill afford, and have been unpacking boxes of glassware wrapped in newspapers that tell you it will be worth bupkis this time next year.

Is this a green shoot of recovery, I asked a friend who understands money. No, he said: things are still more chute than shoot. One swallow doesn't make a summer, and this swallow, momentarily disoriented, has mistaken its migration path.

Then he said something about a dead cat bounce, and my eyes dazzled with tears at the thought of my own pet's eventual end. Shoots, cats, swallows. We're all here for the long haul.

Read more: London Evening Standard

Green shoots of recovery in the property market...?

The Edinburgh and Lothians Property Group, comprising specialist conveyancers Warners, Neilsons, Drummond Miller, the Lints Partnership and Leslie Deans & Co say their "January Sales initiative" may have given the Scottish property market its first sign of a recovery for 2009.

Steve Spence, Senior Partner at Neilsons, said that they had been overwhelmed by the number of people who had already enquired.

"The response to this scheme has been absolutely fantastic and we’re confident that we will start to see many of these properties being sold in the near future," he asid.

"In the last week alone, we arranged 138 viewings for properties included in the January Sales - which is a huge increase on the numbers that we were arranging before the scheme was introduced. These are great viewing figures for any week– for a week in January in the current market they are remarkable. These viewing figures show the buyers are out there and are ready to enter the property market soon.

“It shows that there are a lot of people who are looking to buy properties in Edinburgh at the moment and is a very encouraging sign that the housing market could start to recover during the course of this year.”

Read more: The Firm Magazine