Why we are the last lucky generation of home-buyers

A neat little terrace from the late 19th century, good solid brickwork and a new roof paid for with one of those council grants.

The back is accessed by a ginnel leading onto a shared passage with long, neat gardens stretching off for a good, oooohh, 10 feet.

It was wide enough though – a mighty five feet across, I'd say, edging gracefully into a border of natural fauna and foliage of the weed variety.

When I lived there in the late 1980s, the old coal bunker was perfect for keeping a lawn mower, but I never had one; when the grass got over head height, I took to it with Wilkinson shears. Not Wilkinson Sword. Just Wilkinson, as in Wilko. This being the days before Poundland, they were a hefty £1.99, but did the trick.

As was traditional when it was built in the 1800s there was a cellar. But mine had been spookily bricked up halfway along, leaving me wondering what was behind the wall; Pink Floyd? The communist bloc? A working lawnmower?

I stacked cardboard boxes down there anyway, containing some of my most treasured possessions – VHS cassettes of The Breakfast Club, Miami Vice and some fine early work by American actor Ron Jeremy.

When I went to retrieve them a couple of months later, they were a sodden, sticky mess, destroyed by damp; I had to peel Ron off Demi Moore. She was sandwiched between him and Don Johnson.

You can imagine the mess.

Anyway, there was a lounge, separate dining room, high ceilings, two bedrooms, kitchen, bathroom and downstairs loo. In short, it was very nice and bijou, as estate agents would say. And they never lie.

Perfect for a first time buyer which I was when I bought it for £35,000 . . . at the grand old age of 21.

I'd been working since the age of 17 and lived like a monk to save the deposit, sustained only by a microwave, Wagon Wheels and, of course, my video collection.

But there I was, on the first rung of the housing ladder at a time when some of my mates hadn't left university.

Of course, I got stung with an endowment mortgage, which the nice saleslady promised would pay off my mortgage, credit cards and all Third World debt by the year 2000. Strangely enough, it didn't and I ended up with less in the pot than I'd paid out.

Still, I was living on my own, playing footy three times a week and had managed to furnish the entire place for about £3.50 from Ikea (including meatballs).

All good things come to an end though and when I moved out, I got caught in the early 90s recession, losing several thousand on a property that would quadruple in value over the next few years. Good call, Keith!

Twenty years on and the world is a very different place for young people looking to buy their first home.

Probably the only way a single 21-year-old could get a mortgage three times his salary – and buy a house with it – is if he's just signed a contract in the Premier League.

Young couples now face the prospect of raising families in someone else's house, renting for years if not decades to come.

For many, the only hope of ownership means the death of their parents – and that's if the state doesn't grab the family home to pay for care in their old age.

Us eighties teens may have had to suffer Rick Astley, mullets, big hair and Kylie-before-she-became-cool, but we were also the lucky last generation to be able to buy houses at an age roughly the same as our parents did.

And ownership brings all sorts of novel elements to a twentysomething's world: responsibility, pressure, freedom, Argos, flat-pack furniture, weekly payments.

At best, a sense of achievement. At worst, growing up.

Still there's always the prospect of being debt and mortgage free by the age of 45 – if only that endowment would pay out.

What could possibly go wrong?