So the highly sought-after period res. with original features was knocked down to that devious, smug, self-satisfied Volvo couple at auction? Oh lucky, lucky you. You've just saved yourself a life. As well as skipfuls of money and considerable chagrin.
It's les miserables, the higher bidders, who will soon wring their hands, their wallets and, if they could, the necks of their solicitors and builders.
Remember that big hit of the 1970s - "This old house is agettin' windy, this old house is agettin' cold?" As Shakin' Stevens said: "Ain't got time to clean the shingles, ain't got time to fix the door . . ." Well, remember it and take comfort. If only we had - those of us living the dream of Georgian, Victorian or Edwardian elegance in artisan cottage or redbrick pile. We who have rushed to auction to divest ourselves of a royal ransom. Who have shortly thereafter had a proper survey done. Who have survived the builders' underestimates and lived to tell the tale over and over to our longsuffering friends. We who . . . but that was the fun part.
Those of us who have ventured on through the plaster-dust storm and emerged at long last, stripped of all our assets, into a glorious Post-Restoration realm - how do we live now?
We exist in a state of constant self-interrogation: What am I doing here? Do I own this house or does it own me? When will it ever end? As we ask these questions, we are once again on our knees, in old clothes and rubber gloves, pursuing a new, self-imposed version of penitential monasticism.
We are redistributing dust along miles of skirting board and dado rail. Panning a sponge across acres of paintwork. Climbing ladders with a hoover backpack, trying to reach cobwebs on cornices. And in our lighter moments, replacing lots of little glass jars on recently scrubbed shelves.
Every spare minute is spent like this. There is no more tennis, no more French, just lots of sitting on a hard old bench, cleaning our silver and burnishing our brass. And wondering, now that we have all this living space, how come we've mislaid life?
Living goes out the tall, gracious period window the day you decide to buy an old house. Living becomes a theatrical event with long periods of preparation and rehearsal before the big night - a dinner party, say, or visitors from abroad who have come to see the show.
Living is now squeezed into brief segments of carefully orchestrated perfection called life-bytes.
Your children are, fortunately, unaware that things could be very different. At first, as toddlers, they follow you around trying to help: "Me wash the chandelier, me, me . . ." But soon you learn to lose them somewhere in the basement. Left to their own devices, they organise woodlice massacres and adopt pet spiders.
Later, the kids simply adjourn to the spacious TV room for long, uninterrupted hours of zapping and street fighting, while you get on with the tile-hosing and the bootscraper-scraping.
Finally, unbeknownst to you, they develop rich and varied lives of their own. One day, while you are re-sanding the pantry floor, your daughter comes in carrying the violin she somehow acquired, tells you she's won a scholarship to study in Leipzig and asks for the fare. Amazed and delighted though you are (when did she start lessons?), you are forced to turn her down because all the 12-foot floor-length curtains have to be hand dry-cleaned and it's going to set you back over £2K.
How did this happen to us, us - the Seventies generation, with our long hair and kaftans, who started out with dreams of the kibbutz or of living in artist colonies on tiny Greek islands?
In my own case, I blame P.G. Wodehouse, who took up where AA Milne and Jane Austen left off. Jeeves and Wooster left indelible images of an elegant and hilarious society set against a backdrop of English manorial splendour. This was the life for me, I thought back then.
Indeed, when I finally did feature as a house guest at one such weekend gathering in the heart of Hertfordshire, I found that it was all, amazingly, quite true.
People like Wooster did exist and still existed. Here was a real, live Stage Englishness which outdid anything Barry FitzGerald could have done to Ireland. It was all so delightfully familiar that despite one's Irish Catholic background, one had no trouble at all at all, one thought, in slotting in.
The mansion was built on an estate dating back to the time of Edward the Confessor. William Pitt the Younger was staying there when the English ambassador to the Court of Louis XVI stopped by to tip off the prime minister about the start of the French Revolution on his way to give King George the bad news for monarchs.
The house had all the essentials for a Woosterish weekend. A vast baronial hall with urns, portraits, classical statues and a magnificent staircase leading off left and right. Here one could emerge from the mahogany recesses of one's bedroom and float down in the moonlight to keep one's tryst at the marble statue of the Medici Venus (after the Antique). Or help oneself to breakfast at the sideboard in the oval diningroom, and review, sotto voce, the indiscretions of the night before.
One could wander the lawns and gardens, along mossy stone pathways, under the immense sloping walls of mellow red brick and granite. Happen on secret rose bowers and Japanese pagodas. Explore long rows of glasshouses and budding orchards and then on to the green mysterious depths of the bluebell wood beyond.
One expected to bump into Hugh Grant at every turn.
BUT real life isn't a Merchant Ivory production, not without an unseen army of servants. I was born in an old farmhouse with whitewashed walls, naturally distressed dressers and the designer peeling-paint effects so easy to achieve with eight kids.
I learned to count on the banisters which my mother set the under-fives to clean. I've always known exactly what a period home entails. The replacing of slates. The patching of linoleum. The crash of the sash and the buckling of books under the weight of the windowframe. The squeaking boards. The one hundred thousand crevices. The rattle of the pipes. And the mice in winter. Yet somehow I abandoned a carefree, clean, bare apartment to go and live in the past again.
So if you've escaped so far, best to remember some fundamental truths. That the Americans had very good reasons for Formica. That builders know best and that's why they build so many boxes. That people who live in said boxes have full-time lives. That they get to use the many superb amenities that invariably exist just a short stroll from their quiet cul-de-sacs.
Their lawns can be blow-dried with a hairdryer and shorn in minutes. They can fill the dishwasher, put food back in the fridge, clean all kitchen surfaces and watch TV without moving from one spot. Their kids can redecorate their own bedrooms with posters, paints or water colours.
And they can go to evening classes and learn how to French-polish a table for the day when they will move into an authentic period home.