‘Come on, let’s get a move on with filling in all the forms and we could have this done and dusted in three weeks!’ the estate agent bellowed at me down the phone.

‘Are you perhaps confusing the sale of my house with your Tesco delivery?’ I said. But in spite of myself, I took on board what the agent was saying, and I believed it was possible that in three weeks’ time I would be moving house. Nine weeks later, I wonder why I did that.

Perhaps it was because a terrible disorientation seems to descend when one is going through the moving business. The impending upheaval and ever more complex to-do list grows impossibly, and it starts to make one feel quite queasy, as though one were being tossed about on a rough sea.

It doesn’t help to have a spiky-haired fellow in a tight suit screaming down the phone at you, but by the time you are under offer you are too weak to argue.

I realise, of course, that the agent was giving me his standard pep talk to hurry me through all the form-filling because it has become a nightmare. Since I last sold a property seven years ago, the process seems to have become entirely bogged down by firms selling electronic searches which bear no resemblance to reality.

So a buyer effectively goes backwards through the conveyancing process, from a point where he has visited and seen the house, and had a qualified surveyor go round to vouch for its structural integrity, to a point where his solicitor is staring boss-eyed at gobbledygook generated by geeks who have never visited the property, but have made computers spew out risk assessments claiming all sorts of disasters are theoretically possible if various environmental factors come together in ways they never have.

The Environment Agency has my house in a low flood risk area, for example, but the buyers have found a firm that has been able to come up with it being in a high-risk area, possibly by widening the search circle encompassing my cottage so that it goes beyond the bone dry village green east and west to take in the North Sea on one side and the Irish Sea on the other.

We have argued about this for a while, because they want me to come up with measures I have put in place in Surrey to hold back the marauding tides. But I cannot provide them with flood prevention works I’ve done when I don’t have any flood to prevent.

Back and forth it goes. It would be easier and quicker to forcibly flood my house with a hose, then drain it and install a sump pump, to tick a box.

We haven’t even got to their processing of the local authority searches yet, which I am dreading, because the seller’s information pack asked the question: have you ever written to the local authority?

Oh dear. Where did they want me to begin? I write so many letters to the local council, wherever I live, that I’m not sure they could be quantified.

Many dozens, let’s face it, more like hundreds of emails a year. I spot something annoying and start firing off letters to poke about a bit, not at all believing I can make a difference – I am way beyond believing in anything as idealistic as that – but so that I can irritate them, because while they are all having such a good time at our expense we cannot let them have it all their own way.

How to explain that to a potential buyer? ‘I have written an unquantifiable number of emails to the county, borough and parish councils questioning their policies on everything.

‘But before I lived here I did the same to Lambeth Council, so please don’t worry about it.’

I started sifting through my inbox. Surrey County Council: ‘1 to 50 of many’ said Gmail, which is what they say when you can’t put a figure on it.

If you exclude all the emails I’ve sent asking questions about potholes, or banning horse-riding on common land, or planting more trees while not pollarding the trees that are already there, or about the practice of do-gooders spraying dog poo fluorescent blue to shame irresponsible dog walkers, it narrows it down quite a lot.

The FOI results from when my neighbour and I fought almost to the death over a streetlamp I wanted a shield on and she didn’t accounted for a gazillion gigabytes of emails.

Eventually, I worked out that I had sent precisely two emails that were of any real importance to my existence or in the interests of my property. So I listed those.

The rest of it was just me having a rant about ragwort.