A word of unsolicited advice to laydee readers: never fall for a man who keeps two mobile telephones. You’ll be courting disaster. And gentlemen, I have a nugget for you, too: never fall for a woman who turns up her nose at trashy novels. Why? Just because, as our mothers used to tell us. Because one should never fall for anyone who doesn’t appreciate the point of pointless fun.

Reading rotters is pretty harmless in any case. There’s the lure of the smut, of course, which is enjoyable. And then there’s the enduring pleasure of observing really rich fictional people being unhappy.

I’ve just whizzed through quite a jolly one, about a thoroughly miserable woman in turmoil for hundreds of pages because her gloriously rich and agreeably crooked husband had asked her to lie on his behalf – possibly to the police, possibly to Revenue & Customs. It doesn’t matter which. She was a dreadful prig and I hadn’t the slightest sympathy for her.

The point was she lived in a really nice house, with a very nice ensuite bathroom and a fantastic walk-in wardrobe filled with lots of beautifully ironed clothes – enough to make that silly Mrs Palin feel like quite the poor relation. And she had a cook and a chauffeur – and a housekeeper who kept tabs on all the beauty lotions lined up on her dressing table, and who carefully replaced each jar before it ran out. How about that, eh? Amazing stuff.

I don’t remember where the novel was set. Possibly in Palm Springs. They’re often set in Palm Springs. But where it ought to have been set, clearly, was in Cheshire. Somewhere between the villages of Prestbury, Knutsford and Hale, an area known to local estates agents as the “golden triangle”. It is home to football players and their lotioned-up wives, and, according to legend, boasts the highest consumption of champagne per capita of anywhere in the country.

Priory Farm, on the market for “offers in excess of £4m”, is at the heart – spiritual and geographical – of the triangle, just a mile from the small village of Bowdon, where there are, says the agent, numerous “fashionable boutiques and bespoke restaurants” (because that’s how they really talk, up here in the golden triangle). It is 10 miles from Manchester city centre.

The house is not beautiful, not in the conventional sense. People who see the point of National Trust shops, for example, should turn away now. Ditto all those sophisticated urbanites whose boring minimalist houses look so tastefully, smugly identical. You probably can’t afford it anyway.

Everyone else should follow me. A heathen’s heaven, so it is. A perfect playground for anyone with any money left to see out the end of the boom. Or to welcome in the recession.

There is a plaque in the shiny new brickwork, visible from the remote-controlled entrance gate, that dates the house to 1786. So far as I could see, it was the only real clue the house wasn’t built the day before yesterday.

It has five bedrooms, a tennis court, a heated swimming pool with pool house, two reception rooms, a dining room, a study with a special cupboard for CCTV screens, 8½ acres of land, four stables, a sauna, a steam room, a gym and a staff flat. An internal balcony leads from master suite to two-storey conservatory. Beneath a double garage, a subterranean bar and games room is accessed from the house via a marble-lined tunnel. And there are more flat-screen televisions than I’ve ever seen under a single roof. Most of them were left on when I visited, tuned softly (in the empty house) to the Bloomberg financial channel. The house does not belong to a footballer.

I suppose there comes a point when one simply can’t add any more luxury to a place, when it starts getting silly and you need to invent potential inconveniences in order to spend some extra money smoothing them away. This is the only way of explaining the presence of a second utility room, tucked in between the pool-house gym and the pool-house sauna, behind the pool-house kitchen. It had been installed, the agent told me with an impressively straight face, to avoid the awfulness of having to carry damp swimming towels all the way to the house.

Anyway. The current owner has been in residence, with wife and daughter, for 11 years.

Oh dear. I know it’s none of my business. This is real life, not a novel. Not only that: the protagonists, from their photographs, appear to have unusually warm and friendly faces, which means they really are humans, in spite of their inhumanly luxurious house. In the meantime, let it be known that I would be more than willing to tell any number of lies to the taxman, the police, even the Gestapo, if it meant there was a chance of living in a gin palace like this.

Priory Farm, Bowdon, Cheshire, £4m

What is it? A five-bed detached house in 8½ acres

Where is it? Bowdon, a village 10 miles from Manchester

Who is selling it? Jackson-Stops & Staff; 0161 928 8881, www.jackson-stops.co.uk

Not tempted? Here’s what £4m buys elsewhere

Kent

This five-bed mock-Georgian house has five reception rooms, an indoor pool, landscaped gardens and two double garages. It is in Keston Park, eight miles from Sevenoaks. Alan de Maid; 01689 813333, www.alandemaid.co.uk

London

A three-bedroom maisonette in Notting Hill, arranged over three floors. It has four reception rooms, two bathrooms, two roof terraces and vaulted ceilings. Hamptons International; 020 7034 0404, www.hamptons.co.uk

Hampshire

Summer Lodge is a five-bedroom house with 65 acres in West Tytherley, six miles from Salisbury, with five reception rooms, indoor and outdoor pools and outbuildings including a greenhouse. Savills; 01722 426820, www.savills.co.uk

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