To be a first-timer at anything is clearly nerve-wracking. Take first-time callers to radio phone-ins. How nervous and timid they seem. “Hello, first-time caller,” says the kindly phone-in host, an especially sensitive tone in his voice. Because, you know, the first time you pick up the phone and call your local radio station - let alone Five Live - is scary.

Yet nobody, not even people singing at the Royal Opera House for the first time, or MPs giving their maiden speech, has quite attained the “poor little moi” status of the First Time Housebuyer. First-time buyers. What a total pain those three words have become.

First-time buyers must - and I stress must - be treated with as much care and solace as ickle baby bluetits that have just fallen out of the nest. They have to face off not only the big bad birds that are already on the housing ladder, but the horrid estate-agent squirrels and the nasty tomcats of buy-to-let land, always ready to crush their hopes and feathery ambitions in their rapacious jaws.

God forbid that we should look at first-time buyers as lucky so-and-sos who have probably been living off the Bank of Mum and Dad while working in the City, and thus have a nice little deposit ready to slam down at the appropriate juncture. Or those who, up until about eight weeks ago, at least, could qualify for a 100% mortgage. Nor should we see them as liberated souls, sans housing chain, who don’t have to worry about moving near a decent secondary school, or free spirits for whom a house-price wobble is only ever going to be good, since they will never be in negative equity. We must always see them as people who must be pitied.

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Oh, and the other tragic thing about FTBs is that they can never be expected to move into an area they don’t know. Why not? Perhaps because the purchase and subsequent use of an A-Z is beyond them. But that’s how cities expand. That’s how gentrification happens, loves.

When I was a 29-year-old first-time buyer, in 1994, did I cavil and wail about not being able to move in next door to my parents in leafy (and far too expensive) Wimbledon, southwest London? Certainly not. Newly married, I charged off to Hackney, in the east, a district so far from the orbit of my family, it took 10 months before any relation plucked up the courage to visit me. It was rather fun.

We moved into the house and, because we were FTBs, unpacked all our lovely new stuff, then left the empty boxes outside by the bins, thereby demonstrating what lovely new stuff we had. Two weeks later, we were burgled. That comes with the territory of being an FTB.

“First-time buyers always complain because they can’t buy that flash City flat,” snorts David Whittaker, managing director of the broker Mortgages for Business. “Well, when have first-time buyers ever been able to afford that fanciful notion?” There may have been less moaning and whining in years gone by, when it was possible to get tax relief on the first £30,000 of interest payments on your mortgage – which was a great help to first-time buyers, in particular. That ended in 1990, however – and the market crashed shortly afterwards.

These days, the average first-time buyer – there were 358,000 last year and 401,000 in 2006 – has no tax relief to help, and steep property prices to tackle, so perhaps some of them have a point. Not to Whittaker.

“I don’t think they have a reason to moan,” he says. “It’s a question of how much of your disposable income each month goes on housing. Whether that is rent or interest on a mortgage doesn’t matter. And, if stepping from renting to buying doesn’t involve some commitment, it’s hardly a great transition, is it?

“I know I sound like a grumpy old man,” Whittaker continues, warming to his theme, “but I feel that an entire generation out there has yet to understand that you need to make choices about how you spend your income. And that choice is, ‘Am I prepared to forgo some luxuries or continue to rent and bemoan the fact that I can’t get onto the housing ladder?’ ” Not all first-time buyers are frivolous youngsters who prefer clubbing to paying off their mortgage. In fact, there is no such thing as an average FTB; you merely have to be on the market without anything to sell. So, one half of a divorced couple could be a FTB.

“Clearly, they are important in driving the housing market, but they shouldn’t be seen as special cases,” says Rob Thomas, senior policy adviser at the Council of Mortgage Lenders. Should they have little presents along the way? Discounts on this or that? Er, no, Thomas says – “Although we do think that stamp duty should be adjusted, as the step jumps from one level to the other are inefficient. They ought to be replaced by a graduated system in which you pay the higher rate only for what comes in above a certain level.”

All right, FTBs. It is tough out there, but please don’t squeak too much about it. In a year or two, you too will be a rapacious seller on the housing ladder. It happens.

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