Property Ladder

£75 a week (rent). A one-room Clapham bedsit with hardly room to swing a cat, in fact the door’s a cat flap, goes the joke. On the streets outside, strikes and civil strife but always a crowd within the room. Baker Street and Up the Junction repeating on the turntable. Parties, plonk and frantic fucking. Tearing through the capital in a battered blue mini, going in late into work next morning, open-necked, hungover and unshaven.

£130,000 (mortgage). The Lady waves her iron wand. Moving on and moving up. A small flat on the edge of Notting Hill, MultiYork sofas in the lounge, garlic crushers and thick teak chopping blocks in the kitchen. The first dinner parties, and the first CDs – Sade, Collins and Nigel Kennedy. Smart laughter from another room and the red Lancia parked perilously on the packed pavement below. ‘He’s such a yuppie,’ someone sighs.

£595,000 (mortgage). Marriage and the big house in Blackheath plus a tiny gîte in France. Children and schools, first state, then private and expensive. Saabs and Volvos in the drive. Fewer but more equal friends. Pavarotti and Mozart spinning on the Bang and Olufsen and fizz on summer lawns at Glyndebourne.

£245,000 (mortgage). Divorce and the division of the family silver. Down to a downsized single life in a Wimbledon terrace house, with monthly access granted to the children. Netting a second and more pliant wife, he presses onwards through the decades. And London prices keep on rising, bobbing up the couple like a pair of open corks.

£525,000 (outright purchase). Retirement to a spacious, comfy cottage in the Dales. Brief autumn days with falling leaves, monthly guests up from London and mud-caked wellies on the step. Timed walks along the beck, then coffees or halves of Theakstons at The Bull in Settle while the lamb browns nicely in the Aga. Next, a snoozing drowse under the Sunday heavies, until starting up, confused, and hurtling into Leeds in the 4×4 to snatch the King’s Cross train.

£430,000 (outright purchase). Courtesy of McCarthy and Stone, a sheltered apartment on a Harrogate close. Singsongs, games and quizzes laid on in the lounge and the warden at hand for when you fall. ‘Precipitation’s the term, he learns, and, savouring the word, he semi-likes it: that note of winter weather cycles, of misty drizzle closing in and of tired, aged feet finally dropping from the ladder.