We were about to exchange contracts when I got a call from the estate agent to tell me that another list of queries had come in.

I took one look at it and decided I had better not read it properly, because I saw the words ‘wind turbines’.

‘What the hell is this?’ I asked the agent, who was stuttering: ‘Oh dear… calm down…’

‘Don’t tell a woman to calm down!’ I shouted. And he apologised profusely. I felt sorry for him. It wasn’t his fault. The buyer’s solicitor had gone on holiday and left the file in the hands of a gaggle of millennials, who had managed to unpick ten weeks of negotiations by googling everything – again.

Thus they found a wind farm being built in a village of the same name, in the Peak District.

It took all day to detach the buyer from the suspicion that I had concealed a ground-breaking new attempt to harness non-existent wind power in north Surrey, and then it took another five days to detach him from all the other spurious allegations contained in this bizarre document that an office full of apprentice solicitors had knocked up, in between posting pictures of their macrobiotic plant-based lunches on Facebook.

Is this what a meat-free diet is doing to the next generation?

What these kids had done to my house sale can only be likened to what monkeys would do if you left them in a room with a load of computers. Yes, if they hit the keys at random for an infinite amount of time they would finish my house sale, but they had only had a week. So you can imagine.

It was such a mess, this file entitled ‘Additional Enquiries’, that I glanced briefly at it, read one line of gobbledygook, got back into bed, and pulled the covers over my head.

For days, I insisted to the agent that it had to be a negotiating ploy. They were running down my house and inventing problems to get money off. No one could be this stupid or make this many mistakes. So how much did he want off? The agent assured me he did not want any money off. The mistakes were pretty standard. They were of the sort he saw happening all the time.

I told him I thought we were doomed, if that were true. In a few decades no conveyancing will be possible and no one will be able to move house when the world is fully in the hands of generations Y and Z – so-called, I think, because their computer addiction is such they can only manage to scrawl one letter when asked to use a pen to sign their name.

As well as blighting my house with a wind farm 150 miles away, they had re-drawn the boundaries incorrectly, mistaken one access track for another and lost all the answers to the first set of questions in which I explained that they had got the flood risk wrong. Not high, low – and here is the link to the government website. I did their job for them and sent them the official Environment Agency flood map.

It was promptly mislaid, so that when the next set of questions came in – all 21 of them – the high flood risk was repeated and I was effectively asked again what I proposed to do about most of south London and Surrey being in the Thames basin. ‘Perhaps I could indemnify the buyer from flood damage caused by the malfunctioning of the Thames barrier?’ I suggested.

The agent who owned the company had to take over, and he got going with the business of banging empty heads together so that he narrowed the list of problems down to questions nine to 13.

I had to provide full details of my buildings insurance policy because the millennials refused to believe I had one, or if I did, it could not be what they called ‘normal insurance’ – that’s a technical term – because of the high flood risk.

I felt a fleeting sense of compassion for them as I replied with the low flood risk ratings for the third time. Deprived of red meat and a common-sense education, they were incapable of absorbing new information. I pressed the button on my Aviva policy documents, which they will now lose before asking me why I have no insurance.

‘Where is the stopcock?’ was another of their questions. ‘Round the back of the public washing machines at the M25 services,’ said the builder boyfriend. ‘Either that, or it’s under that flap with the word “water” written on it out the front of the house.’

I emailed this back. Why not? They either won’t get sarcasm, or it will give them a darn good triggering.