The lady standing on the doorstep did not need to tell me what she thought of my house, because the look on her face said it all.

I was still fussing over the minor details of how the place looked while the builder boyfriend waited for me in the car, engine running, because we get out of the way for viewings. Plumping cushions, sweeping dog hair off sofas, I suddenly noticed that the viewing had arrived and was standing crossly waiting, her back to me. She turned and looked through the half open door:

‘Are you the agent?’ She was fuming, you could see that. I said I was the owner but if the agent was late and she was in a hurry I could show her round. She looked at her watch and said the agent was indeed a few minutes late and she could not possibly be expected to hold on any longer.

‘My husband was meant to come but he had an important business call and sent me,’ she said. She was a tall woman, silver-haired, porcelain-skinned, blank and severe looking.

Her husband, a developer – or had the agent said investor? – I had looked up and found out that he lived in a vast and opulent country pile.

‘Come in, come in, don’t stand on the doorstep,’ I said, in as friendly a way as I could. ‘Well, if you’re sure, dear…’ I now placed her accent. She was posh Australian. She walked in gingerly, looking as though the place might be mined. She had on a Burberry mackintosh which she clutched around her as if for protection from some hostile force that might lurk within the walls of a terraced cottage.

The sarcasm in her voice she could not help, I don’t think. It came naturally and she was doing her best to sound complimentary, it just wasn’t working.

‘Oh, it’s actually a lot bigger than it looks from the outside, isn’t it?’ she said, eyeing the worn sofas with bits of dog-chewed upholstery. ‘I mean, from the outside it looks like a tiny little place…’ And she gave a pretty laugh.

I showed her into the next room, then down the stairs into the part of the house that might be said to have the wow factor, the double height kitchen diner leading to the garden through a bifold door.

This has already been disparaged by a viewer who said they would have actually preferred a smaller kitchen on the upper ground floor with no access to the garden. You simply cannot please buyers in this climate. If you don’t have an eat-in kitchen with bifold doors it’s obviously abhorrent to them. If you do, that is suddenly not acceptable either.

So I was prepared.

‘How… unusual,’ she said, looking alarmed. And then she stood in silence. Was her husband planning to downsize from their mansion and force his statuesque wife into here? Had he gone bust? Was he thinking of buying it for one of his grown-up children?

Either way, she did not look pleased. I suggested we go upstairs and as we ascended the steep main staircase I said apologetically: ‘You could turn the stairs if you don’t like how steep they are. We just haven’t got round to it.’

‘I don’t want to do any work to anything, thank you very much,’ she said.

On the second floor, she did compliment the huge loft space that makes an obvious master bedroom. When I suggested she might like to put in again for a lapsed dormer so that she could have an en suite, she snapped: ‘My dear, I haven’t shared a bathroom with my husband in 37 years and I certainly don’t intend to start now.’

She turned herself around the room, clutching her mac around her.

I was lost for words so I pulled the hatch of the front elevation under-eaves storage. It fell out with a clatter revealing that the space behind was stuffed to the gills with clothes. Two suitcases wedged in there began to lurch towards us.

I pushed the heavy hatch door back in place: ‘Er, actually let’s not look in there, it’s all a nightmare…’

She coughed politely and said: ‘You’ve got a lot of stuff to move, haven’t you, dear?’

I said I certainly had, and wanted to add: ‘Do you not have possessions?’

But I soldiered on. Back on the doorstep she turned to say goodbye. ‘Well,’ she said, ‘good luck with it.’

I’m sure she did not mean good luck with the sale. She meant good luck with managing in this cottage with my clothes stuffed into the eaves. I hadn’t even clocked that as a problem before. Now I’ve had to add it to the list.