Melissa Kite Melissa Kite

Real life | 8 September 2016

That may be the norm in France, where he comes from, but it won’t do in Balham

issue 10 September 2016

What is happening to estate agents? Or let me put it another way. If the professional classes thought they were going to escape unscathed from ‘free movement of people’ then they were wrong.

I feel it is only fair to warn the office workers and the suited and booted that their salaries are no longer safe from the Eurovision job contest.

I know this because I have been trying to sell my flat for a while and a part of the problem has been that the agent put in charge of selling it was a young girl who, while sweet, lacked the ideal vocab range.

I overheard her doing a viewing one day: ‘This is sitting room, where you can sit. This is bathroom, for take bath. This is bedroom where you can make sexy-time.’

Oh fine, so she didn’t say sexy-time but you get the picture. When the flat didn’t shift in two months, I rang a rival agent and there turned up on my doorstep a home counties slicker in an expensive suit who ordered me to remove everything interesting and cultured from my flat, the piano and all the books.

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