Real life | 2 April 2011

One of the joys of spring is my annual nose around other people’s houses. Or it used to be. It seems things have changed in the house-hunting world. Estate agency has become automated.

I had spotted a nice three-bedroomed place near Tooting Common and had rung the agent to ask them to show me round.

‘Are you registered with us?’ said the perky voice at the other end, sounding suspiciously like a call centre operative. There then followed an inquisition I can only liken to getting through security at Tel Aviv airport when you’ve got a stamp on your passport from Iran.

It started with the utterly baffling question: ‘Why are you looking to move house?’ Why? I can get my head round an estate agent asking me the what, how and when of my house-moving ambitions. But why? ‘Why do you need to know why?’ I asked, feeling the Kafkaesque red mist descending. ‘Because it’s part of the registration process,’ she said. Clever, clever. These people never diversify from the circular logic of their crib sheet, which is indestructible.

Of course, I didn’t want to tell the disembodied voice of a person known to me for 30 seconds the story of last year’s abortive attempt at getting hitched to the world’s most unpromising candidate for a husband and now finding myself alone and wondering whether I ought to invest in a larger property anyway. But you can’t argue with someone filling in a form, so I had to tell her.

‘Oh, I see,’ she said. ‘Yes,’ I went on, warming to the honesty of my theme. ‘And then I saw that house and I thought, I’d quite like to buy that because it’s got a big pile of logs in the breakfast-room hearth.’