Six months into marketing my flat, I can no longer bear to read the feedback from viewings. This is because I have had a long stream of unpleasable young idealists poking around, being snooty about absolutely everything.
It’s a lovely apartment, and I’m gutted to have to leave it to be nearer the horses. But a move to Surrey is unavoidable, and so the agents bring sulky-looking first-time buyers around one after the po-faced other. And each viewing prompts the same ludicrously picky feedback, always featuring the infuriating complaint that the garden is “not south-facing”.
This baffles me, because when I bought this flat as a young professional I was delighted to have a small square of outside space with my dream starter home in the big smoke.
I don’t think I even asked the agent which way the garden faced. I seem to remember he said west, although even now I couldn’t be sure unless I got a compass out.
I’ve been sitting in it for 15 years, enjoying the sun on my patio until about 4pm. It has never once occurred to me that I have been short-changed because the garden does not allow me to irradiate myself between the hours of 4pm and sundown.
On the odd occasion I have wanted to sunbathe in the evening I have gone out to the front garden with a deckchair. Oh, didn’t I mention? There’s a lovely cottage-style front garden as well, facing directly south, so if you are a sun worshipper, you can always sit there.
But no, not good enough for today’s thrusting young professionals who want a blazing dawn-til-dusk suntrap behind their London pied-à-terre. “They’ve seen another flat with a south-west facing garden,” says the agent, after pretty much every viewing.
I’ve come to the conclusion that if you’re marketing to first-time buyers you need to realise that young people nowadays want everything. And they want it now. During a previous attempt to sell last year, I went under offer to a young couple who demanded I let them in – that very day – to measure up for their new kitchen.
“Hang on a minute,” I told the agent. “I haven’t even found a house to go to yet. They need to understand this is a process.”
But the couple wouldn’t listen. After three weeks of them pressuring me daily as to whether I had found somewhere, I pulled out. They ended up buying another flat two doors down – no doubt because the owner did not live in it so they could get in immediately to measure up for their kitchen fittings.
No wonder Amazon is trying to find a way to deliver parcels by drone: your shopping dropped out of the sky almost the second you click the button. That’s what it’s going to take to keep the millennials happy.
When we look back, I’m sure this lot will come to be known as the “All I want is everything right now” generation.
As far as I can see, young people have never been more demanding, more high maintenance, more complaining, more impatient, more unreasonable and more unwilling to compromise on anything.
How else to describe a generation prepared to riot because they’re not satisfied with a democratic referendum result?
How else to explain the Corbynista phenomenon? What is that if not a group of twentysomethings bizarrely radicalised by a falsely inflated sense that they have never had it worse? When it is nearer the truth to say young people have had it a lot worse several times in living memory, including during two world wars, one Cold War and one Black Wednesday, with interest rates at 10 per cent and negative equity.
Having survived as a student during the latter period, I recall that we played Nirvana records. But I don’t remember anyone marching on Downing Street because they felt their lives were blighted indefinitely. And I don’t remember anyone in my year at university getting the hots for a bearded lefty who promised a kinder politics, amid a climate of bricks being thrown through windows by those allegedly concerned about Syrian refugees and the availability of mortgage deals.
In our world-weary insouciance, we were actually way cooler than this lot of eager beavers, who affect outrage at every headline, and appear to be consumed with the idea that the establishment is getting one over on them – that they deserve better, because they’re worth it. They can hardly stay out of Parliament Square long enough to attend Glastonbury. I bet they bore their parents rigid when they get home from a hard day’s demonstrating to bang on all evening about the evils of fiscal conservatism – while the old folks try to get drunk on red wine and have a sneaky spliff.
Never mind apathy. If you ask me, the moaning millennials are far too engaged in politics for it to be healthy. And they are way too uptight to enjoy a patio garden, that much is abundantly clear.
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