Is this so?Assuming I could afford to buy a holiday cottage for £200,000 to £275,000 in East Anglia – an area I know well – what might be available to me? What do you consider the pros and cons of holiday letting?The adviceGRAHAM NORWOOD REPLIES:There are seven golden ru-les for holiday home letting:* Choose a good location – East Anglia is ideal: close enough to London for those wanting long holidays or weekend breaks. The sale would take longer and buyers would be more likely to want to bargain down the price below the threshold, she says.Therefore, I want to sell now and, instead, buy a holiday cottage which I can rent out. I am told that some coastal areas are still appreciating rapidly, so the potential benefit to me will be higher than keeping my buy-to-let. MARIA ROBINSON OF BALHAM, SOUTH LONDON, WRITES:
Six years ago, I bought a small buy-to-let property in Streatham as an investment, and it has since risen from £140,000 to £235,000.
My estate agent advises me that the market is likely to be flat for the foreseeable future. She says that if I want to sell my buy-to-let in the next year or two, I should do so before its value goes over £250,000, at which time any buyer would have to pay stamp duty. Like autism, of which it is a mild form, Asperger’s runs in families.
The university professor of computer science with the brilliant mind, few friends and an obssessive interest in model trains is the classic sufferer. Michael Fitzgerald, professor of psychiatry at Trinity College Dublin, claims his research has proved that the former Irish politician Eamon de Valera, right and W B Yeats, left, showed symptoms of the condition.. They have to learn social skills intellectually rather than intuitively. Two to three children in 10,000 are affected and the condition is four times commoner in boys. People with Asperger’s are mostly of normal intelligence but have narrow, intense or obsessive interests. They suffer social impairment and have difficulty making friends and forming and keeping relationships.They lack the ability to understand the subtext of social situations, and make remarks that cause offence or behave in ways that breach the rules of acceptability.
It is unbiased information and that gives it increased validity.”Such people are not distracted by human things like wanting to chat or have coffee.”The ‘maleness condition’Asperger’s syndrome is rare but increasing. Professor Fitzgerald said: “I take all the biographical data that was collected contemporaneously. He was regarded as so eccentric that the other members of the Cabinet suspended normal rules of behaviour for him.”After accepting he had no chance of winning the leadership of the party, Joseph urged Mrs Thatcher to stand and they became close political friends. In the mid-1970s, Joseph set up the Centre for Policy Studies which developed the free market ideas of the US economist Milton Friedman and impressed them on Mrs Thatcher.”His ideas have influenced politics for 20 years. Monetarism has some of the characteristics of Asperger’s in its insensitivity and its harshness – that is my point, the man and what he does in life are one. It is important to know this because these people control the destiny of the nation,” Professor Fitzgerald said.According to Professor Fitzgerald, other politicians who showed symptoms of Asperger’s include Enoch Powell, the Tory MP and former health secretary whose “Rivers of Blood” speech in 1968 provoked widespread protests and blighted his career.Eamon de Valera, one of the dominant political figures in 20th-century Ireland and a leader of Ireland’s struggle for independence, was also afflicted, according to Professor Fitzgerald.He also claimed that creative geniuses including W B Yeats, George Orwell and Sir Isaac Newton had Asperger’s.
Once attending a camping exhibition, he surprised visitors by giving a lecture on Communism. He had a lack of empathy and he was na? in social situations. In the early 1970s, he was urged by friends to challenge Edward Heath for the Tory leadership but he lost any chance of winning after making a speech in Birmingham in 1974 in which he implied that the lower classes should be deterred from having children.Professsor Fitzgerald said: “That is the kind of comment he would make and mean it from the depths of his heart but it was absolutely strange. The former Conservative education secretary, who was Mrs Thatcher’s mentor in the 1970s and 1980s, had Asperger’s syndrome, a condition that renders sufferers unable to interpret social situations or to empathise with other people, according to Michael Fitzgerald, professor of child and adolescent psychiatry at Trinity College Dublin.
Professor Fitzgerald conducted armchair diagnoses on prominent politicians, artists and scientists using contemporaneous records.
He presented the results to the conference of the Royal College of Psychiatrists in Glasgow yesterday.Joseph – who died in 1994 – was a brilliant lawyer who served in Harold Macmillan’s government in the 1960s but was prone to eccentric behaviour and errors of judgement that can be attributed to his mental condition, Professor Fitzgerald said. Sir Keith Joseph, the father of Thatcherism whose free market principles are still followed to some extent by Tony Blair, had a form of autism that is reflected in his political philosophy, a psychiatrist believes. “The Government should take immediate action to radically improve the current situation in which agreed standards are only met in 3% of units Life is too precious to gamble with in this way.”. The infant mortality rate in England and Wales is at its lowest ever level – 5.1 per 1,000 live births in 2004.” Liberal Democrat health spokeswoman Sandra Gidley said: “It is extremely concerning that mothers and their babies are being forced to travel long distances to get the special care they need and with some not getting it at all. “Neonatal care services are under pressure from NHS trusts to make financial savings and because of this, staffing and equipment shortages have been severely neglected.
