My idiot's guide to housing madness

In recent months my wife and I have been offered, in the course of our despairing search to find somewhere to live in northwest London, a number of "garden" flats more suited to cave-dwellers, so little natural light did they have, but for which the proud owners would not accept less than half a million pounds.

We have visited an attic flat, strewn with the urine-stained belongings of the poor old lady who lived and died there, which was so decrepit and so expensive (£420,000) that even the property developers wanted nothing to do with it. We have been offered a mansion flat on the Finchley Road where you can enjoy the privilege of paying an annual service charge of £3,800 for hot water and a tiny lift.

But most depressing of all, we have seen innumerable flats which developers have striven to render identical. They apparently believe that if you want to sell a tiny flat, the best thing you can do, apart from sprinkling downlighters across the ceilings and installing the latest oven in the kitchen, is to put in at least two extra bathrooms, or shower-rooms, or any other kind of plumbing you can think of. This absurd superfluity of washing facilities is then somehow meant to make up for the essential, ineradicable lack of much actual space in which to live.

Perhaps the people who buy these flats spend their entire lives washing. Perhaps they do not mind that the proportions of the original rooms have been ruined by trying to cram in three bedrooms where there is only room for one.

Or perhaps, when one sets out to buy a house or a flat, one should simply abandon, with a worldly laugh, whatever common sense one may possess, and should enter into the fantastic illusions propagated by estate agents to their clients. For this is a world in which "spacious" means cramped, "imposing" (as in "this imposing period residence") signifies an utterly unimposing house built between the wars, and "convenient for" (as in " convenient for the Northern Line") means inconvenient for anywhere.

But these stylistic points are as nothing compared to the prices being asked. The property market has gone mad. The latest figures from the Land Registry show that prices rose by more than 10 per cent in England and Wales in the past year alone, and it is scant comfort for those of us looking for somewhere to live in London itself to find that prices here rose by a mere nine per cent. These steep increases come at the end of a runaway boom which has seen property prices in London and the South-East rise by between two and three times during the past five or six years.

Anyone who buys a house or a flat now could easily find that within a year or two the market has crashed and the property is unsaleable for anything like the sum paid for it. Why then do people take the idiotic step of buying a house or a flat at what is most likely the peak or near the peak of the boom?

This is a question that I am well qualified to answer, for I am one such idiot. During the past two years my wife and I have trudged the streets of London looking for a place to buy. We and our three small children find ourselves in this predicament because we returned here in March 2000 from a stay of nearly six years in Berlin, and because I, fool that I am, sold the small flat I had in Pimlico before we went away, and also because our eldest child is attending an excellent state primary school from which we do not want to remove her, but which is in a very affluent area.

For two years I have been telling my dear wife, whose nesting instinct is much stronger than my own and who gave birth to our third child only last December, that prices are bound to come down and if only we wait a few more months we shall be able to get much more for our money.

The longer one tries to maintain that argument, the weaker it starts to seem. "A few more months" has already stretched into "a few more years", and meanwhile we have nothing to show for the tens of thousands of pounds we have spent on rent. We have sat on our hands, watching prices go up, missing bus after bus.

My wife got very keen on a maisonette she saw while I was away. It had most of what we wanted, the price was surprisingly low and there was scope for making an extra room in the roof. I went to see this maisonette and disliked it. Unfortunately my mother was with us at the time, and she agreed with my wife. They were extremely vexed when they heard me describing the property on the telephone to my brother as "a lousy little house", dark, north-facing and poky.

There is a limit to how much of that sort of pressure I can take. There is also a limit to the number of lectures I can take from our most dynamic local estate agent. She is about 20 years younger than me, but like a schoolmistress trying to knock some sense into an unusually dim child, she tells me over and over again that prices are rising all the time, prices always will rise all the time and you can never lose by buying property.

A number of the other estate agents with whom I have dealt appear to have lost their jobs, so unsatisfactory have I proved as a client and so intense is the competition between dozens of different firms. Frankly, I am tired of living in rented accommodation and would like to have the wretched problem of where we are going to live settled. I am 44, so if we take out a mortgage now, I shall be 69 by the time we have paid it off.

Not that my advancing years make building societies and banks unwilling ( provided we take out life insurance and critical-illness cover) to lend vast amounts to us and indeed to just about anyone. The temptation is to conclude, impatiently, that "it's all Monopoly money", so it does not matter if you spend far beyond your means.

We have just found a small but absolutely delightful house in Gospel Oak, just south of Hampstead Heath. We have made an offer for it which has been accepted, and we very much hope that the deal will go through swiftly and without a hitch. After that, as far as I am concerned, property prices can and probably will plummet. I never want to buy another house in my life. I am happy to end my days in Gospel Oak.

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