Do you despair of your adult children, still squatting in their childhood rooms? Kit Hesketh-Harvey shares his wisdom on dealing with the boomerang generation.
Just look at the opening pages of this beautiful magazine. Oh, you already did? Well, even I’ll admit that the property pages are some of Country Life’s real attention-grabbers. Enormous houses, up and down the kingdom, with ancillary accommodation, lodges, cottages, barns, annexes, staff wings and attics for conversion. touch them, stroke them!
Surveys reveal—oh, you don’t hide from our boys—that you, dear reader, are likely to be a beneficiary of the 1980s hike in UK property prices. You never dreamed, did you, that the equity in your place would increase 20-fold. I didn’t. Face it—we done good. However, now, the chickens are coming home to roost. Literally.
We did as we were done by, expecting our issue to stand On their Own two Feet. We kicked them out. We made their rooms unwelcoming shrines to permanent sixth-form-hood. school-leaving photos remained unframed, art projects were left in mortifying view. Empty Jägermeister bottles and souvenirs of God-knows-what rite of passage gathered eloquent dust. the moment they left for uni, we piled black dustbin bags full of clothes onto their beds and turned off the radiators.
But whaddya know? the kids came back. the boomerang generation, they’ve been called. they have no choice. Back in the day, we could buy our own place for three years’ salary. Nowadays, that wouldn’t meet the mortgage deposit. the latest batch has nowhere else to call home. I (luckier than most) also garnered a holiday home and a London foothold, of sorts. I can’t get into either. Both are being squatted in, either by my children or their acolytes. We’ve triggered Article 50, but they’ve proved Remainers.
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