Live and let let

When you tell people, they recoil as though jabbed with a lavatory brush. ‘You mean you still actually pay rent?’ is, in middle-class terms, a question akin to: ‘You mean you still actually listen to Boney M?’

But with this impending property collapse that we keep on scaring each other with — just the other day, a team of expert economists predicted that prices will fall by more than 6 per cent over the next two years — you might soon be hearing a lot more about people like me. People who rent, that is.

I will admit that the image of renting a flat is a bad one. One automatically thinks of a divorced man in his early fifties in a one-bedroomed effort with an uncovered immersion heater over a filthy sink who insanely believes that his place is a shag-pad; we also think of the pretty lady he has met at the bar who climbs the loosely carpeted communal stairs, her dismay deepening with every step.