Wise move

Everyone is moving. Everyone except me. KC is moving. And of all the streets in all of London, it looks like he is moving on to mine.

KC and I started on the same day at work and have been complaining ever since. He is house hunting with his attractive teacher girlfriend, who has benefited from the sudden death of a rich relative (the only way you are likely to get on the property ladder in London. Unless you are those two Polish painters who decorated a banker’s new house in Canary Wharf and decided they liked it so much they changed the locks and kept it for themselves. Quite enterprising, really).

KC and his girlfriend pop in for a cup of tea. I root around the cupboard for cups that are not chipped or covered in coffee smudges and tea stains. They tell me they have been looking at a one-bedroom first-floor flat a few doors down. They show me pictures. I see that it comes with a garden which is approximately the same size as a Subbuteo pitch. It is selling for £249,000 – roughly the same price my parents’ 4-bed detached home with garden, garage, shed (Mother: ‘It is not a shed it is a summer house.’) and little pond with occasional frogs is going for, up on the borders of the Lake District.

But KC and his girlfriend are young and in love and excited about buying their first place. I tell them the garden has potential.