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How to afford a house: a guide for millennials

YOUNG? Worried you’ll be renting forever? These tips will get you on the property ladder before you can say ‘mouldy hellhole’:

De-gentrify the neighbourhood

Encourage your desired neighbourhood to go downmarket by discreetly littering it with syringes, crumpled copies of the Daily Star, and perhaps some Greggs bags. It’ll be a shit hole, but it’ll be your shit hole.

Make your expectations more realistic

Your problem isn’t a nation of smug baby boomers sitting on billions of pounds of unearned property value. No, it’s your high standards which are the real issue. A ‘house’ could be a collection of wooden pallets at the end of your parents’ garden, you know. And do you really need a roof?

Move in with someone

OK, you’re fairly sure your scumbag of a potential housemate slept with your sister and never called her back, but he has an IKEA futon of his own – what more do you want? Sign a mortgage contract with this degenerate right now and stop complaining.

Buy a flat instead

Flats are like houses but less good and squashed on top of one another, which surely means they’re really cheap. It’s not like you’d have to pay through the nose for a property where you can hear the neighbours having sex and the leasehold means you don’t even own it forever. That would be madness.

Wait for a global catastrophe

All you need is something really big and unprecedented to happen which gets everyone scared and shakes global confidence. Like a scary virus that anyone could catch. If something as apocalyptic as that happened then house prices would be on their knees, right?

The dull as f**k milestones every parent shares on social media

RAISING a child is packed with significant moments which nobody except the parents gives a shit about. Here are the milestones you’ll idly scroll past on social media:

The ultrasound scan of a baby in the womb, which is a grim harbinger of the mundanity your timeline is about to be inundated with.

Baby’s first night at home, which is just a photo of a wrinkly baby nestled in a duvet. It will get more likes than the entire history of your statuses combined.

One month ‘birthday’. No, you shouldn’t expect to be amazed by this minor achievement.

The first time the baby slept through the night. A thrilling moment for the parents, so tedious for everyone else that they’ll start nodding off.

Meeting the grandparents. Two boring extremes of the age spectrum come together in a photo that’s somehow more dull than the sum of its parts.

Six months ‘birthday’. Yep, parents really mine this angle for all it’s worth. And it works every time because old relatives on Facebook love this shit.

Their reactions to seeing things for the first time. Parents know this is a ‘like’ goldmine so will exploit it accordingly. Expect to see photos of a baby being blown away by telegraph poles, salt bins and manhole covers.

A particularly messy mealtime. Not shared will be the desperate pleas of the parents to just eat the f**king food instead of throwing it on the floor.

Eight months ‘birthday’. This is taking the piss now.

When they learn to walk. An impressive feat for a toddler, but so commonplace in adulthood that the novelty has long since worn off.

First day of school. The kid visibly doesn’t want their awkward photo taken, and we don’t want to look at it either. Everyone’s a loser here.

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