A barrister friend of mine used to get the shakes when she travelled on the London Underground. She spent so many of her waking hours with lowlifes and knife murderers, she began to imagine the human race was made up of nothing else — to such a degree that at the end of each evening commute, she felt truly grateful to have come out of it alive. Years on, the neurosis lingers, but luckily she’s very successful, and only ever travels now by taxi. All’s well that ends well. Still, it’s a funny thing how a person’s profession can distort their view of the world.

I’m not sure you could call it a profession, but I used to work as a waitress in a restaurant in Knightsbridge where I was expected to tie plastic bibs around the diners’ throats before the meal began. Women, obviously, tended to decline that part of the service, but plenty of the men were less averse. For some time afterwards, I used to divide the entire male sex into two possible groups: the Good Guys (who would tie their own stupid bibs, or better yet, not wear one at all) and the Pathetic Guys (thrill-deprived wetties who would insist that I tie the bib on for them). In practice, by the way, of the men that came into the restaurant, there was a ratio of about one goody for every nine wetties. It didn’t occur to me until later that said statistic was not indicative of the entire male sex, due to the fact that you had to be pretty low-rent to want to go to that restaurant in the first place.

The view has changed since then. No more gentlemen’s bib-tying for me. As it is, I generally work from home, or from a private library filled with nothing but sophisticated and friendly authors, so I have almost no interface with the more obnoxious elements of the general public at all. In fact, if it weren’t for the Sunday Times readers’ letters that come pinging onto my computer, I might by now have been lulled into believing that humanity was a benign, intelligent, wellmannered and beautiful thing.

The letters, unfortunately, tell a different story. (Letters, I should add, to any of the papers I have ever worked for, not merely to The Sunday Times.)

Partly because, like the bib-loving restaurant brigade, the angry-letter brigade is a self-selecting group. Most normal people are too busy with their own lives to want to send abuse to an unknown journalist. Yet the sad truth is that for every useful, interesting or witty letter I receive, I get at least 12 from people so full of rage, I can only assume they’re writing to me as part of some sort of anger-management therapy drill, from deep inside a heavily guarded padded cell.

So, when my editor came up with the brainwave of actively encouraging readers to communicate with me by inviting them to send details of their own properties for sale, the heart did not sing.

As it turns out, though, the loonies have so far stayed away. I’ve received lots of good stuff, the best of which, at time of writing, is Bartholomew House: sent to me by Christopher Richardson, an eminently sane, indeed likeable, solicitor/antique dealer from Lewes, in East Sussex.

It’s a Grade II-listed 1820s townhouse with a front of original glazed black “mathematical tiles”. It’s on the market for £799,950, and at present, the front room on the ground floor, formerly a dining room, is opened as an antiques shop every Saturday. The house stands a little back from the High Street, just below the 11th-century castle, beside Bartholomew Gate and overlooking the castle’s Gun Garden — so the shop is perfectly placed for passing foot traffic, and is especially busy, I’m told, during the opera season at Glyndebourne, a mere four miles away.

The house was built as a dower house for the local butcher’s mother, and although the front looks impressive, the interior — it has three to five bedrooms (two could be used as studies) and two sitting rooms, if you include the shop — is simple, with low ceilings and lovely old pine floors and doors.

The current owner, as one might expect of an antiques dealer, has filled the place with a lot of small objets. He has also painted all of the walls and ceilings in the same good-taste, brownish pink, which — I think — feels slightly oppressive.

It’s a lovely house, though, peaceful despite being right in the middle of the town, and with stunning views over the castle and high street to the South Downs beyond.

Richardson and his barrister girlfriend, Doris Urquhart, both of whom have adult children, are selling up to move to Suffolk, to open a bigger and better antiques shop. The new owners of Bartholomew House may want to convert the Saturday shop back into a dining room. On the other hand, they might enjoy having their view of the world shaped by frock-wearing, culture-loving, antique-buying English opera-goers.

Myself, I would prefer the loony letter writers. Or serial killers, perhaps. Anyone at all. Either way, the house is a gem.

Selling your house? Think it could stand up to Daisy’s all-seeing eye? E-mail daisy.waugh@sunday-times.co.uk

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