Her indoors

The more chatting I do, the more useful life lessons I learn. Who would have thought that a woman should avoid buying a house when she is pregnant, as she doesn’t have her full wits about her? The husband of Nancy, a colleague of mine, was abroad when she made the decision to buy in an allegedly up-and-coming area of south London.

Her husband, Malcolm, was as thrilled as Nancy when he first saw it. The five-bedroom house is exquisite, both inside and out. The rooms are spacious and shapely – those at the front are bathed in light in the morning, while those at the back have a roseate glow in the evening.

But although they are only five miles from central London, where they both work, it takes 45 minutes for Nancy and Malcolm to drive there. Everyone knows that Mayor Khan’s traffic calming measures of recent months have made journeys from south London into the West End even longer and, of course, with congestion charging, much more expensive. Why can’t they go on the tube? Their work involves them carrying too much stuff to allow it.

The house should be worth much more than they paid for it, but they can’t sell it and move to a smaller property closer to central London because Nancy didn’t have her wits about her when she bought it – she forgot to have a full structural survey carried out.

Had she done so she would have found that the house is, in theory, liable to subsidence. The data harvesting boom of recent years means that it now appears on a Subsidence Register, so is worth only 70% of what a house of its size would normally command.

Last year they were invited to go to a late-ending party in central London that would take place on a Saturday night in the sporting club where Malcolm goes for fencing practice. It had never occurred to him to ask to have a look at the club’s bedrooms, but once he did, he decided to push the boat out and book a room for himself and Nancy to stay in after the party.

Nancy told me that the joy of stayi