I was at a party on election night 1997. Weren't we all? Or maybe not. In any case, the party I attended, although crammed to the gills with London's jeunesse dorée, was in a rough corner of town, at the end of a long, badly lit street notorious for muggings; the sort of street on which, after dark, you only travelled by foot if you were in a large crowd or feeling dangerously liberated by alcopops.
Nevertheless, so exuberant was the mood among London's golden youth that golden night, so ecstatic were we at the thought of this brave new egalitarian world, that all usual caution was thrown to the winds. Doors to the magnificent party house were thrown open and all comers welcomed to the throng. Before long, the house was packed. Squeezed in among the excitable, new-Labour-voting Old Etonians were large numbers of ne'er-do-wells from the neighbouring White City estates.
There were tellies turned on in every room. Side by side and shoulder to shoulder, we cheered as the results came in. We embraced as Portillo lost Enfield. And in the morning, our hosts awoke to discover that all the tellies were gone.
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A bit embarrassing, all that euphoria, in retrospect - acutely embarrassing when you see where it has landed us now. Remember how we all thought Tony Blair was the new messiah? Every current-affairs program began with a breathless announcement of one of his nonsensical targets: "The prime minister wants to abolish sexism by 3.33am, June 12, 1998..." Ha, ha, ha. Weren't we silly? (And by the way, when I say "we", I'm only pretending to be complicit. For the record, I knew Blair was a drivel merchant probably even before he did - from the moment he gave that chin-wobbling speech about the People's Princess, on the morning Princess Di died.)
But I'm wandering. The point is, he was somewhere near the peak of his messiahdom at the time he agreed his continued support for the Millennium Dome. He must have been, because it was reported, with puppy-dog enthusiasm, that the deciding factor in his giving the wretched £800m project his go-ahead was that it met with the approval of Euan, his 13-year-old son. The little fella apparently said "Cor! Wow!", creating a new standard by which any proposed project could be judged: does it have "the Euan factor"?
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And so we have the dome, in all its staggering hideousness: a monument to the peculiar aesthetic tastes of little boys, and to our propensity for sentimentality when it comes to popular leaders and their kiddies.
I took Zebedee, my eight-year-old, with me to look at 2 Vardens Road, in Battersea, south London. After three years of renting, we are looking to buy a house, and such is his hunger for a home of his own, the poor boy has become obsessed with domestic architecture. He spends hours on line, examining houses we can't afford. The more modern they are, the better he loves them.
This house is certainly modern. On the market for £1.425m, it's a four-bedroom, 2,095 sq ft property, just seven years old and refurbished to spic'n'span new by the developers who own it. It has two full glass walls on an open-plan ground floor, and on the glass-ceilinged, atrium-style upper floor are the bedrooms, two of which have ensuite dressing rooms.
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Hidden behind a row of ordinary Victorian terraces, it is reached via a high wooden security gate. That opens onto a long, high-walled, white cement open-air corridor, at the end of which is the house, a structure of glass and cedar wood. And there is a lawn of Astroturf, with a hot tub in the corner.
I have rarely been greeted by a more hideous sight. It looks like the set for Big Brother. Appropriate, really - it turns out it was used for a Big Brother photoshoot for Loaded magazine (can it get any classier?), which installed the hot tub by the Astroturf and invited various female contestants to dive in.
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Ho, hum. Zebedee thinks it's the grooviest house he's ever seen, and is determined, regardless of any practical factors, that we should move in. I try to explain to him that not all groovy houses are equal. Number 2 Vardens Road, although groovy enough, is ugly and soulless. It feels tacky.
He doesn't listen. He points out that if you open the glass doors at the back and front of the house, and clear away all the furniture on the ground floor, you would have an excellent and very private football pitch of about 80ft by 20ft, including the garden, that is.
He also tells me he has memorised the security code for access to the garden, and the last time we spoke, he asked about the legal rights of squatters. I told him that they have none, and that expensively trained public employees come after them with cattle prods and electrocute them, often to death.
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I don't think he believed me. Anyway, the owners might do well to keep an eye out for any small boys with footballs lurking suspiciously at the front gate. Apart from Euan and Zeb, I can't imagine who else would want it.