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Until quite recently, it was possible to decorate your house once and then spend the rest of your life eating cheese and drinking wine. But because this is no longer possible, I have just installed a completely new kitchen.

The trouble is, every time you turn on the telly, you have Kevin McLoud, who is a genius, telling you that your oldeworlde farmhouse ways - and all your grandfather's hand-me-down furniture - is horrid and must be burned immediately.

Then you go to the newsagents where, in the olden days, you had a choice of Horse or Hound. Not any more. Now you have Interior Design, Design Interiors, Home Design, Design Home, Interior Home, Country Home, Country Home and Interiors. And the one I can never resist: Wallpaper*. This is Men Only, in zinc and lightened ash.

It is full of angle-poise lights, all of which cost a million pounds, and rugs which are usually a tiny bit more. And there's no escape when you walk round London these days, because it's rammed with furniture shops called BO and VD. All of them will go bankrupt when the economy slides into recession, but for now, they're winking at me as I walk by, like a parade of hookers.

I went in one the other day and bought the skin of a springbok which had been dyed orange. It looked great and was very reasonably priced at a mere £4,775,000.

The result of this onslaught is no one can ever be truly satisfied with where they live. Which is why I've just removed an extraordinarily well made Mark Wilkinson tongue-and-groove farmhouse kitchen and replaced it with something so clean and clinical I'm certain I could operate on your family in there with no fear of them catching MRSA. Although they might get sewn up with a tea bag still inside. That can happen if you remove someone's appendix on top of a dishwasher.

Anyway, my new kitchen is made by a German company called Poggenpohl and, disappointingly, it's fairly terrible. Oh, it looks wonderful, a forest of right angles and brushed aluminium, but it was mind-bogglingly expensive for what is basically a lot of poor-quality wood, and, worse still, I have a sneaking suspicion, it's not very well designed.

The Germans may be able to make a car door that can be opened a million times a minute from now till the end of time, but I suspect the life expectancy of the doors in my kitchen will be measurable in minutes. Which, of course, is a good thing, because by next Tuesday, I shall have seen a new kitchen in Wallpaper* and I shall want that.