Until my ex-wife’s lawyers sent round some pimpled Dickensian lackeys to serve me with divorce papers in an alleyway outside my publishing company’s offices on a wet evening in March 2006, I hadn’t given much thought to the London property market. I was vaguely aware prices in the best parts of town had soared in recent years, but neither my wife nor I was tempted to make a quick buck out of our lucky position on the property ladder.

Why would we have wanted to move, anyway? We owned a 2,700 sq ft flat close to Hyde Park, with 24-hour porters (the type wearing full morning suit you used to find at Claridge’s). It was just below Claudia Schiffer and Matthew Vaughn’s place at the exclusive Palace Court, off Pembridge Square, W2. The building is probably the closest London has to such renowned New York Upper East Side coop apartment blocks as 625 Park Avenue, inhabited by the likes of Henry Kravis, the private equity billionaire, and his wife, Marie-Josée, whose lifestyle appeared to appeal so much to Conrad Black and Barbara Amiel.

The closest I had got to any sort of real experience of the market was a moment – three years ago – when Claudia and Matthew had their flat on the market for about three months at £1.8m. (It is now worth about £3.3m.) “Let’s buy it,” I said to my wife. “If we knocked the two together, I’m sure we could sell it on to an oligarch for a fortune.”

Instead, my wife decided to divorce me. As the proceedings ground on over the 18 months that followed, I remained in denial about the idea of moving on with my life. Then the decree absolute came through, and in February I finally moved out of our marital home.

I lived with a succession of friends, including a stint in the bottom bunk bed normally occupied by Elizabeth Hurley’s nanny. I even managed to negotiate a suite at the Thistle hotel on Bayswater Road for £100 a night. (The trick is to make the booking after 10pm.) After two months of living out of a suitcase, however, it was time to find a place of my own. So I called a property “finding” agent, Dan Crofton of Crofton and Associates.

I was in the middle of selling my publishing business, so, at first, I was a pretty awful client. I didn’t have any idea what my budget was, and was still technically paying the mortgage on our marital home, which made getting another loan almost impossible. But I had to see what was out there, so I began looking at what I could get for up to £750,000. In late June, I gave Crofton a briefing and we went on my first viewing tour.

For months, newspaper pages have been full of whining stories of disappointment, frustration and despair from people trying to find an ideal family home in London. That’s the last thing I wanted. Instead, I told Crofton to find me a “postdivorce flat”. The remit was clear: at least 900 sq ft of lateral space, no stairs, a decent reception room for dinner parties, not too much noise, ideally located somewhere in W8, W9, W10, W11, SW1, SW7 or SW5, so I could walk to work at my new offices in Chelsea. “For up to £750,000, we’ll probably have to make some sort of concession,” he warned me. “Location, floor size, lease – how do you feel about a walk-up if there’s no lift?’

Our first stop was an apartment block in Maida Vale, not far from Lord’s cricket ground. The porter was a gruff, rude fellow in jeans. I was quickly getting a reality check on life post divorce, sans home or address. At least it had a lift, though. “We could definitely get a deal on this place,” Crofton said as we went up to the fifth floor. “It’s on at £550,000 – I just want you to see what’s out there.”

Walking down a corridor, we turned towards what looked like an emergency fire escape. “You don’t mind heights, do you?” the agent asked nonchalantly as we walked along a narrow outdoor landing ledge. It was no more than 3ft wide, with a 150ft drop behind a single open-air railing. In fact, I hate heights, and, as I edged along those 25 yards to the front door of the flat, with my hands tightly gripping the rail, it was like the walk of death.

The flat measured just 650 sq ft and was the kind of place I would have expected an Al-Qaeda cell to work out of. I quickly realised that £550,000 would buy me nothing more than an outdoor fifth-floor kennel. I walked out after less than a minute, with a look that told Crofton everything he needed to know.

Fifteen minutes later, we went to see a first-floor flat in a large, classic villa in Little Venice, looking out onto perhaps one of the largest and nicest communal gardens in London. It was in terrible condition, but it had a wonderful 35ft reception, comparable to any drawing room in, say, Onslow Gardens. And it had two bedrooms.

If I saw it today, I would snap it up. But they wanted £775,000, and warned there were already offers at asking price – I didn’t want to get into a bidding war. It went for £800,000. With a bit of work and modernisation, it must now be worth at least £1m.

The other flats I have seen in the past four months have been average, mediocre, depressing, spivvy, shamefully overpriced, pure gambles, ghastly and borderline transgressing the trade descriptions act. Highlights have included a flat in a mansion block in Kensington, with a bedroom next to the communal boiler; a nasty first-floor conversion in Warwick Square, on for £850,000, with a plastic frosted wall for a bedroom partition; and another at the same price on Cadogan Gardens, in Chelsea, with just 40 years on the lease and a living room that looked as if Saddam Hussein had trashed it after an orgy.

The nearest I came to buying was a vast, run-down 1,400 sq ft one-bedder on the corner of Addison Crescent and Holland Road, with a great garden, parking and a drawing room the size of any house in the Boltons, Chelsea. It would have made the perfect bachelor pad – except that I couldn’t walk to work, it was nowhere near any good restaurants or pubs, and the road outside was so noisy it felt like you were camping on a motorway.

Despite all this talk of a slowdown, the London property market remains a shark-like poker game where bluff, steel nerves, patience and luck are obligatory. When I was married, I banned people from talking about property at dinner parties. I considered it even worse a social crime than texting between courses or leaving the room to talk on the mobile.

Now, after missing two flats I loved, finding a property has become an obsession.

Most days after work I go to see yet another place that, nine times out of 10, is spivved up, overpriced, noisy, appallingly converted – or all of the above. After two months of despair, and having finally sold my business, I have pushed my budget up to £950,000.

The only bit of good news, as far as I’m concerned, is that since the global credit crunch there really does seem to be a change of wind. More stock is quietly slipping onto the market, and sellers don’t seem to be expecting to get their asking price any more.

I had been lied to and humiliated. Not only that: when I heard that a developer had outmanoeuvred me to a £965,000, 1,000 sq ft flat on Lexham Gardens, I crashed my rental car on the autostrada in Italy while plotting with Crofton how we could gazump him. It remained a dream.

Okay, I couldn’t really afford the place, but I was determined to buy it anyway. Such is the natural jungle law of prime London property.

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