I've lost my job - so I buy a house

LUNCH over, I'm taking the winter air with my friend Laura and her new consort. It's midafternoon, and we're standing outside the front door with the sun gloaming away low in the sky.

Laura sucks down about half a Camel Light in one gasp. "Aahh," she says, giving voice to the profound satisfactions of a lungful of smoke taken after an enormous lunch, when the air is cold.

We watch the passing parade. There is not much to watch. The trees on Dalberg Road are peaceful and leafless. The telegraph poles are in their proper places. No birds sing.

I feel a little sentimental. This is my last winter in Brixton. Come New Year, job or no job, we're moving to Archway. This is a time for rumination, optimism, a little sadness.

Counter trend, as I like to think of it, my fiancée Alice and I have put in an offer on a house in north London - a creaking wood-chipped hulk, conveniently sited for access to chip shops and bookmakers, hard by a fatal roundabout, as the estate agents did not describe it.

When I found myself abruptly out of a job before Christmas, my first thought was: "Thank goodness for that: I got my mortgage in place, based on my comfortable regular salary, before I found myself unemployed."

My second thought was: "Oh my God. I'm doomed. I got my mortgage in place, based on my comfortable regular salary, and now I am unemployed."

Like those baffling accounts of the behaviour of light - both a particle and a wave - the two opposite thoughts continue to coexist in my mind. Relieved and terrified; terrified and relieved.

Lord knows what it must be like for the estate agent. You should have seen the look on his eager little face when it became clear that the one couple trying to buy a house in London in the second half of 2008 was going to buy it through him. He was like a drowning man being thrown a lifebelt and dragged aboard the Playboy yacht.

Then the dawning fear. Having been taken up with the whole redundancy thing, it hadn't occurred to me to give the agent a bell.

When I did, it turned out that he had been trying to contact me every day for two weeks: on my non-existent landline, on my defunct work email, on my vapourised mobile phone number.

If phones could sweat, this one would have.

"I've been desperately trying to get hold of you," he said. "Are you all right? I was really worried. I thought something had happened to you."

"Aah," I said. "Nothing happened. I just lost my job."

There was a glacial pause, a pause of whelming horror.

"But don't worry. We're going ahead with the sale."