The estate agent flashed a sarcastic smile and said it wasn’t so much that the market was in a bad place, rather that my property got so much ‘negative feedback’.

I stared back at her, fuming. I had popped into the offices of this agency to ask for my key back, which I forgot to do last year when I gave up on them being able to sell my house.

This summer, I’ve given it to a friend at a smaller agency, hoping he does a better job than the city slickers at this well-known outfit where they all shout ‘Rah-de-blah-de-rah-de-blah!’ no matter what I say to them.

Miss Smarty Suit, the lead agent, was on the phone when I went in, and a tall chap with floppy hair strode confidently towards me and greeted me with such swagger that he almost pushed me backwards out the door again.

The window display he backed me into was replete with glossy adverts for footballers’ homes, which is to say mock Georgian red brick piles with white pillars and swimming pools and asking prices of many tens of millions of pounds. I wondered why I ever settled on this as my agent, as the floppy-haired oaf bore down on me, baying his pugnacious greeting.

When I asked for my key back, he shouted ‘Rah-de-blah!’ and went to get it. Smarty Suit looked up from her desk and gave me the ‘I’m very busy with someone more important than you’ grimace.

She then rather ludicrously hurried this person off the phone, lurched from her desk and strode at terrifying speed across the room to greet me, backing me into the window display again. This time, the amount of swagger left me inches from dismantling the shop front by crashing into the swinging Perspex display adverts.

Even so, I decided to be nice to her. I said: ‘It was a rubbish market last summer, so don’t worry.’ But she smiled back viciously and said: ‘Oh, it wasn’t the market. It was all the negative feedback you were getting.’

Oh yes, the negative feedback. ‘They don’t like the stairs,’ she invariably told me after almost every viewing. I told her at the time: ‘I could take the stairs out, but they are going to have trouble getting to the first and second floors.’

She didn’t see the funny side. ‘They don’t like the stairs,’ she told me in another gratuitously rude and pointless email after the next viewing. ‘Well, they could always not go up them and just sleep in the living room,’ I suggested.

‘They liked the location, but unfortunately they didn’t like the property,’ was another of her strangely vindictive feedback messages.

‘That’s fine,’ I replied. ‘I’ll have the house put on a low-loader and towed away and a dormer bungalow put in its place. I mean, I assume bungalow, because they don’t like the stairs, right?’

But in all the time I dealt with her she never cracked a joke, or saw the funny side of anything. And that would be forgivable if she could sell houses, but she could not.

When I saw her bringing round old ladies who could barely hobble up the front step, I told her: ‘Listen, have you not got any young couples, or families – you know, people who can walk unaided? It’s a terraced house on three floors, not a retirement flat with a concierge and a lift.’

But she kept piling the old and the infirm round, and they kept complaining about the staircase. How to explain the basics of marketing to such a person? I thought about just sweeping all the pens and papers off her desk by way of reply. Luckily, Mr Floppy came back with my key so I walked out.

The new agent knows me too well and always says ‘Don’t shout at me’ before every feedback conversation. The first couple he brought to view were in their fifties and still in possession of their powers of perambulation.

However, as I had seen while getting the dogs out of the house as they came up the track, they owned a Tesla. You can’t stretch a cable across a public footpath on a village green to a cottage with no driveway.

‘Don’t shout at me,’ said my friend afterwards. ‘The lady liked it but the gentleman…’ I know, he needs somewhere to plug his Noddy car in.

The next one came on Saturday and by Tuesday the feedback was in: ‘They don’t like being able to see cars.’

So Tesla man wanted his car closer to the house, whereas the next viewer wanted her car, and everyone else’s, further away. I assume that in her hunt for a view which does not include cars she will be looking further afield than Surrey. Antarctica, for example.