As Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor learnt to their cost, there ar etimes when you need to give a thing up more than once. When something is particularly beloved, you have to weaaaar the connecting cord thin with a few half-meant half-cuts before it finally snaps once and for all.That's how most love affairs end. Well, it's how most of mine did. Which is fine. Giving up and taking up with lovers is relatively inexpensive.

What with agents' fees and stamp duty and all the ghastliness of keeping a place tidy while prospective buyers (and journalists) poke their noses round your bedroom, giving up and taking up with beloved houses is an altogether more cumbersome process, as Lady Morrow, the owner of Edinburgh Huose in Alderburgh, has no doubt discovered.

She and her husband, Sir Ian, bought the house as a holiday home in 1954. A brilliant management consultant, he is warmly remembered, by people who follow these things, as the hero who stepped in to save Rolls-Royce for the nation. God rest his distinguished soul. He died two years ago at the magnificently distinguished age of 93 - which, one must assume, is at least one of the reasons why his wife has put the house on the market. For a second time.

She has sold the house once already, in the early 1990s, to none other than Ruth Rendell, one of our most successful and most prolific crime writers, who also used it as a holiday home. A decade or so later, Rendell, who, given the scale of her output, must have penned some of her works there, sold it back to the Morrows, who had presumably come to realise that they should never have parted with the place to start with.

Such a reluctance to move on is understandable: it's a lovely property, even if the price, at £900,000, is a bit steep. The name - which comes from Prince Alfred, Duke of Edinburgh, Victoria's seafaring son, who appartently stayed there - makes it sound like a grand address. Actually, it's a three-bedroom cottage overlooking the beach in the heart of a town beloved of second homers, yachties, Benjamin Britten fans (he is buried in the churchyard) and fish'n'chips.

The house is not large - less than 1,800 sq ft - and is in need of a serious overhaul. Especially on the ground floor, where what space there is has been wasted on a needlessly large bathroom and a utility room almost as big as the kitchen, while the kitchen itself is too small to eat in. One of the three bedrooms is also on the ground floor, partly, I imagine, to save its elderly owner from struggling up and down the stairs. It's a good-sized room, begging to be turned into a decent kitchen. Both sitting rooms - there is one on each floor of the house - have 1970s-style electric heaters installed in the fire places.

Although all this will inevitably mean added expense for a prospective buyer, such niggles will probably fade to insignificance on first sight of the upstairs drawing room. At 19ft by 20ft, it's big for such a small house, with a wide bay window and, beside it, a pair of french windows opening onto a terrace. they look out on nothing much more than a small wooden fisherman's hut, selling fresh fish - even on the cold December morning I came to call - a long, empty, pebbly beach and the sea.

The town I saw was quaint and wonderfully deserted, reminiscent of a 1950s comic-book seaside resort. Apparently, Aldeburgh becomes rather more frantic in the summer. Still quaint and old-fashioned, by all accounts, just incredibly crowded. At the peak of the season, I'm told, two-hour queues form outside the famous, if unimaginatively named, aldeburgh Fish and Chips shop, which is just a few minutes' walk from Edinburgh House.

One way or another, the combination of the music festival set up by Britten, the yacht club, the upmarket golf club (said to be one of the best in the country) and that long, pebbly beach acts as a magnet to a particular middle-class, nostalgia-loving mindset. Hence the high proeprty prices.

After having visited for the first time this week, it's hard to imagine such a tranquil place being overrun by queues and people. On a cold morning in mid-December, it's rather lovely: a perfect place to knock off a few brilliant crime novels, save a nation's most cherished car company, eat a lot of relatively cheap, freshly caught fish or roam the beach contemplating the old navel.

I would suggest interested parties move fast and take the place off the lady's hands as soon as possible, before she changes her mind and takes it off the market again.

And for those of us who can think of nothing much more spirit-crushing than a summer surrounded by a lot of classical-music-loving, golf-playing, Boden-wearing, family-loving, utterly decent English people, I recommend letting it out for a fortune during the summer, and taking a time-share in a nice modern holiday flat in Boca Raton. Where the brigands go. And you can still play golf. And there isn't such a frightening empahsis on good, clean, old-fashioned fun. And nobody's wearing Boden.

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