It's a glum sign of the times that when I told a friend I was moving house, he casually said: "Oh yeah. Are the wife and kids moving with you?"

I replied that, yes, they were thank you, that we were all moving to a . . . bungalow.

There was a small flicker from him. There's a small flicker, at least, from everyone, and it's based on snobbery. Our bungalow is, if you ask me, beautiful, but I am developing a neurosis about the "B" word.

I try to tell myself that the top of the boys' bunk bed constitutes a kind of second storey. I find myself calculating how many storeys the house would have if you rebuilt it vertically, consoling myself with the thought that it would be bigger than the properties of most of those who've taken the mickey out of it, especially if you had only one room per floor.

It all started with our surveyor. I asked him what he thought of the house, and he said: "Great, especially if you're retired."

More than the fact that there are no, or very few, Georgian bungalows, it's the association with retirement that damns the bungalow in so many people's eyes, suggesting, as it does, a grateful fleeing from a life of undistinguished wage slavery.

I was moaning to the wife about how I would now be in for years of bungalow and retirement jokes, and she said: "Well, you do act retired sometimes."

I asked her what that was supposed to mean, and she said: "Your favourite programme is Dad's Army, you make bread [this was rich, given that she bought me the breadmaker], you have an allotment, you asked about joining the local bowls club [this is true, but only because I thought their bar would be a good place for a party] . . . and," she concluded, "you'll soon be living in a bungalow."

It's very annoying. The bungalow is in the very part of London I've long wanted to inhabit. I always thought that, as soon as I got there, my insecurities would cease. But I should have known that, in the English class system, no sooner do you reach one social summit than you find another alongside you, more inaccessible and still higher - by a whole storey, in fact.