Over the past month or so I have been spending a lot of time with everyone’s least favourite professionals. Our house is up for sale and alternative homes are being sought for various members of the family, which means that every day I speak to assorted estate agents, either to discuss progress in hawking our place, or the possibility of paying an unconscionable sum to buy someone else’s.

Until this exhausting, exciting and thoroughly unsettling process began, I would have told you there were four things wrong with estate agents. For a start, they charge too much. If they sell a house for ￡1m they stand to gain about ￡20,000, a pretty steep return for taking some photos and showing a few people around.

Second, they are untrustworthy snakes, always keen to assure buyers there is “a lot of interest” in some pokey basement, while at the same time telling sellers that a mingy offer is the best they will get. Third, they tend to be dim: flogging houses requires no particular qualifications and attracts those too thick to get into the City or the law. And finally they butcher the language with their dumb, transparent euphemisms.