After all the shenanigans with hoodies kicking my front door down, the neighbours nicking my bike and the other neighbours partying like teenagers, it all got too much and I decided to move house. I thought it would be a matter of finding somewhere to live and moving in about 5 or 6 weeks. How wrong I was.

After scoping out the likes of Tring, Jo my flatmate got us looking in Berkhamsted - a small market town with a Waitrose, a gym, a parish church with a choir, an arthouse cinema, country walks and nice canalside pubs - everything I could possibly want to keep me happy. We set about the search for a flat in January, hoping to clear out by March. The magnitude of our delusion is only now clear with the gift of hindsight, for getting into Berko was like trying to infiltrate a highly exclusive members' club reserved for the well-heeled. Our property search turned into a five-month litany of disappointments and despair.

• Property 1: beautiful old cottage-style 3-bed flat with open timber walls, fitted kitchen, right on the high street. Landlady (mother of a friend of a friend) was going to rent it out and then changed her mind (after thinking it over for 6 weeks) because she wanted to keep it as a pied-à-terre (along with her three other pads).
• Property 2: pleasant modern house on a hill overlooking the town, all mod cons, going cheap - landlady gave it to someone else because we were waiting for landlady of property 1 to make up her mind.
• Property 3: pleasant modern flat in 1980s block with balcony, overlooking allotments and churchyard, with modern fitted kitchen, private garage and big lounge. Viewed it, said we liked it - as the agency refused to take bank transfers for deposit payments, I had to get the train to come and sign the papers in person. Spoke to landlord on the phone twice in the morning to confirm I was coming - then as I was going to get the train he phoned to say he had given the property to someone else. "That's the way the market goes", apparently. So that's all right then.
• Property 4: another flat came up in the same block - nice balcony views and all that. Surprise-surprise, just as I was rushing to view it, the agent phoned to say they had given it to someone else. Bastards.
• Property 5: imagine our joy when, a few weeks later, another identical property in that same block came on the market. Sadly the decor was a bit rough and the kitchen looked like it had been put in circa 1980 and was in desperate need of replacement - despite which the landlord was demanding £100 more rent than his neighbours. Sadly, when we registered our interest, the landlord (who lives in Saudi Arabia) could not be contacted for weeks on end. We waited and waited. Then he couldn't make up his mind on the quotes for repairs and kept us waiting. Then he wanted to fly over to Britain to look at his property (for the first time in 10 years). Sure enough, Eyjafjallajökull erupted in Iceland, spewing volcanic ash over Western Europe and grounding all flights for a fortnight.
• Property 6: (late to viewing due to a delayed train) quite a nice flat on the high street with immaculate white walls and shiny fitted kitchen. Sadly, one bedroom was the size of a postage stamp, and tenants were not permitted to hang pictures on the walls. At my age, being prohibited from hanging a picture on the wall is an insult too far.
• Property 7: getting a bit tired of this now. Nice flat, all modern interiors but.... rent was £200 extra per month, with a tiny second bedroom. To cap it all the landlady wanted six months' rent up-front - that's six grand. Goodbye.
• Property 8: whilst rushing to view yet another flat (late due to a delayed train), removal men suddenly carried a table out of a shop and set it down on the pavement in front of us, blocking our passage. It was at this point I realised I was actually living in a a scene from The Truman Show in reverse, where conspiratorially choreographed manoeuvres try to prevent us from entering the town, not from leaving it. When we got to the flat, we were rather disappointed to find that we were viewing it along with five other people all at the same time. The flat was so crowded, it was like a coach party touring the British Museum. I don't know who bagged that flat, but as the lettings agent wasn't even answering the phone, I envisage a fist-fight at the agents' offices.

For the purposes of brevity, I am omitting another half-dozen or so other flats we viewed which were unpleasant council-estatey boxes. Many were advertised as having "two double bedrooms" - the usual estate-agent weasel wording for a boxroom into which you could fit a double matress and nothing else. Unfortunately for us, the standard floorplan to which architects build is arranged around couples who share a bedroom, with the second bedroom suitable only as a child's bedroom or a study. The needs of two independent adults who do not wish to sleep together is so far outside this demographic that nobody seems to build flats with two genuinely double bedrooms.

Finally there is a happy ending. We have found a gorgeous place which has space for adults to live, a small balcony, all mod cons. To top it all it is located just behind an exquisite 1938 Art Deco cinema, complete with nobby cocktail bar and restaurant. We sprinted to the lettings agents' office to sign the papers and hand over our money. Had we finally penetrated the interior of Hertfordshire? Were we finally in there?

Well not quite. A few more twists to come: first we had to be subjected to a credit check to ascertain we were trustworthy (the fact that I have been renting flats continually since 1987 and have never missed a payment in that time counts for nought in this cut-throat world), and to bring this about we had to pay the £200 credit-check fee ourselves (picking up the agents' overheads, as is standard). For a monent there was a risk that the credit agency were going to get funny about my work contract (despite me being more solvent now than I have been in all my life) and demanded a fax number and landline number for the BBC office I work in. Asking around the office for a fax machine was like asking people if I could borrow a Ford Model T - blank looks, and remarks like "we haven't seen one of those since the eighties". Even a landline was a tall order, ever since the BBC outsourced its telephony to Siemens, who last year installed a system which stopped working entirely so everyone has to use mobiles instead.

I did in the end get it all sorted, and we are due to move in three weeks, but I look back in amazement at how a collection of apparently disconnected forces could conspire so effectively for five long months to prevent our arrival in Berkhamsted - property owners, estate agents, train companies, telecoms service contractors, architects, men carrying tables, credit checking agencies, airlines and an unpronounceable Icelandic volcano. I want to know who manages them all, because they're bloody good.