No life
Social indicators
Toby Young
Shortly after I moved back to London, after five years in New York, I decided to have my flat valued. I wasn't expecting it to be worth much. It's a two-bedroom maisonette in Shepherd's Bush that I bought for £81,500 in 1991. At most, I thought, it would be worth about £150,000. You can imagine my delight, therefore, when the young woman from the local estate agency told me it was worth £250,000. I elected to put it on the market immediately.
Not a day has passed when I haven't regretted this decision. To begin with, it clearly isn't worth anything like that much. After it had been on at £250,000 for two months without generating a single offer I dropped it to £235,000 but another month has passed and I still haven't had any offers. My estate agent has advised me to drop it another £10,000. The upshot is that instead of feeling pleased that my flat has shot up in value over the past nine years I feel as if I've become £25,000 poorer in the last three months.
Assuming I do eventually sell my flat, I'm hoping to buy a house in the same neigh- bourhood, though I keep having to reduce the amount I can afford to spend. I don't know what the most depressing aspect of buying and selling property is: standing idly by while total strangers come and give my stuff the once-over or going round other people's houses and discovering that they have exactly the same stuff as me. I used to rather pride myself on my kitchen, with its beachwood work surface from Ikea, its Bosch dishwasher and its chrome Braban- tia pedal-bin. However, I've now discov- ered that every single kitchen in the Shepherd's Bush area boasts exactly the same three items.
The trouble is, after seeing perhaps 60 houses, I can now pinpoint the social class of the occupiers within seconds of crossing the threshold, and my fear is that the peo- ple coming to look at my flat can do like- wise. Some of these are obvious. I don't have double-glazing, thank God, but the floor in my living room is what's known in estate agents' lingo as 'wood-effect floor- ing' rather than wood, which is very, very bad. You can see the look on people's faces as they take it in, a look that says, 'This'll have to come up, for starters.'
Others social indicators are more subtle. I've got two large bookcases in my living room — or 'reception space', as my estate agent calls it — and they always solicit a comment from the men in Next suits show- ing people round. 'Have you read all these?' is the usual question, followed by an embarrassed little snigger. I know from my own research that estate agents aren't what you'd call bookish types. I always make a point of asking them whether they've read Tim Lott's White City Blues, which as far as I know is the only literary novel in which the protagonist is a Shep- herd's Bush estate agent. So far the answer has always been no.
Still, I can't afford to be too snobbish about this. Visitors to my flat are confront- ed by cream-coloured wood-chip wallpaper as soon as they come through the front door and they then have to climb a flight of carpeted stairs that smells like a dead sheepdog. The first thing they see on enter- ing my 'reception space' is a Beavis and Butt-Head poster, followed by a lifesize poster of Erika Eleniak, one of the stars of Baywatch. If they venture into my lavatory — sorry, 'bathroom' — they'll find an auto- graphed photograph of Pamela Anderson and a dartboard with Martin Amis's face on it.
My girlfriend thinks I'll have a much bet- ter chance of selling my place if I 'house doctor' it. Of all the property programmes on television at the moment, the best is House Doctor which is on Thursdays on Channel 5 at 8. 30 p.m. Each week, a no- nonsense Californian 'house doctor' runs her eye over a property that has been lan- guishing on the British market for months and then helps the vendor spruce it up for as little money as possible. The property in question then sells within a week.
The trick is to root out all the class indi- cators, turning it into a completely class- free zone. There isn't much I can do about the wood-chip wallpaper or the 'wood- effect flooring' but the Beavis and Butt- Head poster, the sheepdog carpet and the Martin Amis dartboard will all have to go. That way, people won't take one look at my flat and think: `Aha! Perpetual adolescent with no money suffering from deep-seated literary envy. How very middle class.'
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