WHEN we bought a terraced house in York 26 years ago, a colleague reckoned we’d been had to the tune of about £20,000. That’s how much cheaper the house would have been a year earlier.

He may well have been right. But we’d bought a flat in London less than two years earlier for £41,000 and sold it for half as much again. So we were quits, more or less.

Anyway we weren’t in it for the money; we were in it for the house. We stayed there for more than 20 years, raising a family, adding a room or two, then moved again three-and-half-years ago. We did all right from these transactions, but not well enough to write off the never-ending mortgage. Building work added a row of bricks to the loan at one stage; as did the need to escape from that great 1980s investment opportunity known as the endowment.

“Sign here,” the man from the building society said in 1986, “and in 25 years’ time, you’ll be skipping off down the road with gold bars lining your pockets.” But it was not to be.

Property prices are in the news again. Sorry for pointing out such a dispiriting thing. There are probably few matters more dulling to the soul than property prices. Yet they are important in the sense that a country which measures its wealth by the cost of its houses is in a bad place.

When we moved to York, it was possible to buy an ordinary house on an ordinary wage. Now this is much less so. Our pleasant but unexceptional 1920s semi on the outskirts of York would be beyond us if we were starting out now.

House prices in the capital are said to be rising by 16 per cent. So I thought I’d go online to see how much flats and houses cost where we used to live in south-east London. This, remember, was the scraggier, less fashionable end of town. A detached Edwardian house in a good street was on the market for £1.85 million. A large semi could be yours for £1 million, while flats with two bedrooms were going for up to £500,000.

A two-bedroom flat was what we had, converted from a large house with a monkey puzzle tree outside. Perhaps it is now a money puzzle tree.

Property prices in London have put buying a house or flat well beyond the reach of ordinary people. The situation is less extreme in York, but this city still has its problems. Many residents have little or no chance of buying anywhere because York has expensive houses and relatively low wages: an unkind combination.

Our children may well find it difficult to afford a mortgage at York prices, never mind London’s inflated tag. Perhaps a new generation will grow up renting instead. This is not a problem in itself, but it does depend on good and fair private landlords, and a degree of security for tenants.

Mark Carney, the Bank of England governor, is worried that house prices are rising too fast. He fears that an over-heated housing market could explode and leave a nasty mess sticking to the ceiling. Well, he used language more befitting to the nation’s bank manager than that, but he did express concern that a housing boom might undo the recovery.

The Chancellor, George Osborne, is thought by many to have added to house price inflation with his Help To Buy scheme (unofficially known as the Help To Keep George in Office scheme). House prices are another of those things than don’t mix with politics.

 

RICHARD Scudamore, the chief executive of the Premier League, will face no censure for sending sexist emails, as brought to light in a newspaper.

It is possible to have mixed feelings about this.The emails, however unpleasant in nature, were private, so there is a private-public split here. Yet it’s hard to avoid the impression that Mr Scudmore wriggled out of this tight corner because he is a powerful and influential man. And even nowadays, some powerful and influential men still think it’s all right to carry on like sexist dinosaurs.

The grubby emails appear to have been made public by a disgruntled female employee. Mr Scudamore might feel aggrieved about this. Yet mostly he should feel shame. We should all allow ourselves to be ashamed sometimes, and this week it’s Mr Scudamore’s turn.