I'm sure Naomi Campbell doesn't use Skype, and I doubt has she ever had a mortgage. So I guess she won't be reading this.

It’s been a tough task tearing myself away from the Blood Diamond saga involving Naomi Campbell and Mia Farrow.

Utterly compelling stuff.

But I managed to wriggle free, which afforded me the opportunity to spend 4 hours hogging the utterly important and generation defining news that Robbie Williams, a sort of a rough diamond himself, has married someone or other. In his $14mio mansion. A boy from Stoke owns a $14mio mansion in the US. That’s unsettling.

Like my self loathing for knowing about Paris and her Methuselah’s, I hate myself for knowing about this and for talking about it.

I think we are our own worst enemies. We all give out that this stuff is flooding our TV and Radio airwaves, but the fact is they wouldn’t be running these stories unless us muppets are interested.

We’ve come a long way from Smoke Signals

Ok so I give short shrift to the celebs and the rough diamonds now move on to an obvious, excellent yet still strangely under-utilized way to save serious cash. How much is your phone bill on a monthly basis?

Before you answer me, I am going to take the brave step of playfully calling you an idiot. Because if it is anything more than the standard rental charge, then you are overpaying.

And with that my dear friends, I bring you Skype.

[In case you have been living under a rock, Skype is a way to make voice calls over the internet. And if you are live and online already, and if you are contacting a fellow Skype user, then it is utterly free. You can also call land and mobile phones at deeply discounted rates. To coin an expression commonly associated with George Dubya, it’s a no brainer!

And with webcam technology you can also now make video calls.]

In 1999 a mate of mine was in a Docklands flat share with an IT boffin from New Zealand. I’d call over regularly, and this guy was forever ‘speaking at his computer’ to his cousin in Arizona.

I found it weird, unsettling, amazing and scary.

There were no pictures at this stage, just voices. He said it was free. I was amazed.

I guess the cross channel ’laptop shouting’ by the Kiwi IT boffin it was an early version or a precursor to Skype.

I just thought it was freaky and never fully registered with the economy of it because this was at a time in my life when I had no respect for money, I knew the price of nothing, the value of nothing, nor cared. I was an impressionable youngster with flash shoes, flash phones and more money than sense.

An expensive form of arrogance if you total up phone bills of roughly 10 years, times 12 months, times £100. That could by you a few rough diamonds.

Yes it took ten years to embrace Skype. This was when my sister moved to Australia for the Summer last year for 4 months with her family.

So all last summer at various times of day and night I could call up my sis, and whoosh as she answered the skype-call, her image would pop up on screen. Voice as crisp and clear, and the image perfect. It was a bit like Star Trek in the 1960s, only perfectly real. The quality was in fact superior to a conventional phone call, and indeed it sounded like she was really in the next room.

I am still amazed, when I ask around, how few people actually make use of Skype.

Lots of people these days have friends and family in far flung places, try Kazakhstan, the Cook Islands and Buffalo for starters. That’s where Skype works and saves you a small fortune and more importantly maintains contacts and friendships, and there is no price on that. So what’s keeping you. Go to Google, type in Skype, click on a few of the thingamajigs and hey presto you’re up and running. It’s as easy as defeating a super model at scrabble!

Safe as Houses

More recently I have found the expression ‘safe as houses’ to be quite hysterical. Certainly so for the poor unfortunate who bought a house in ‘the next great development’ for £400,000, but who is now sitting on, and sleeping in a house in a 15% occupied ghost estate, that is now worth £150,000, without proper security, lighting, water or parking. Safe as houses indeed.

Anyway I promised to keep you updated on my dealings with the bank manager.

Well all was given the ‘green light’ by my crumple-browed and perma-hassled bank manager to go ahead with this house purchase, however the only problem now appears to be that I am trapped in a bidding war bubble with two other parties who would appear to be keen to acquire the same house!

It is utterly hilarious. Trapped in a depression, country slip sliding, debt crisis, unemployment, and definite slowdown (whatever the boffins might be saying), a few people with a money to sense ratio of approximately 5:1 reckon it would make perfect sense to chase a house price up to 20% above its guide?

So I have taken a chance, and have decided to assume that no rich seams of gold deposits lie directly beneath the property, and I shall let my two nemeses to fight it out to the death.

My logic I think is fairly concrete, pun not intended: take a 2009 statistic…in the UK last year there were 943,414 empty homes in the UK, and it is estimated there are 300,000 empty homes in Ireland. So time, and inventory is on my side.