I know this will get me in trouble, but I do not care about your renovation

I’m sure there was a time, indeed I may have lived through its blissful days myself, when banging on about your home renovation like a broken nail gun was seen as the social equivalent of discussing your technique for operating a vacuum cleaner, or scratching yourself.

These were also the days when the idea of a television show focusing entirely on people sledging down walls, sighing in dusty disappointment and picking paint colours would have been laughed off as even more absurd than two strangers marrying each other for ratings reasons and calling it a “reality” program.

Today, however, if you’re the sort of person who finds the idea of handy-mundanity as exciting as watching paint dry, and then painting it again, you will be made to feel like the odd, boring one out.

Indeed, not acknowledging and lauding the artistic and aesthetic genius of your friends’ home-improvement efforts can lead to a form of social death just as effective as detailing your bowel movements at dinner parties.

I know it’s polite to be excited about things your friends are currently trilling about, but when someone hands me a photo of their new fireplace, I tend to look, and feel, as blank as the wall they’ve shoved it into.

When someone tips you off like this, it does at least give you a chance to rattle around in your dazed head for the right appreciative comments about marshmallows, cosy winter evenings and the fact that smoke from fires is one of the largest causes of global warming.

What is far more socially awkward is when you visit a friend, they expect you to notice the changes they’ve made to their home, and to clap your hands in delight over them like a toy monkey, and you don’t.

I recently had the misfortune of calling in on a mate who’d just completed a complex, colourful and apparently unmissable job of tessellated tiling out the front of his house. Immediately, I could sense there was something wrong when he declined to invite me in, preferring to continue the conversation on his shiny new front step, which I entirely failed to recognise as being new. Or interesting.

Eventually, he gave up and just fumed, “So, do you like the tiles or what?” and I effected to be hugely impressed with his interlocking handiwork, only to be informed that he hadn’t done the tricky tiling, he’d paid someone else a fortune to do it. Which made me wonder aloud why he was so proud of it. Which may be why I haven’t been invited back since.

And it’s not just small things I’m too disinterested to notice. Visiting a family whose home had been massively renovated in the year or more since I’d been there, I completely failed to exclaim my delight, and had to be reminded, by my wife’s dear and loving elbow to the ribs, that things had changed, and changed marvellously.

Even then, I found it hard to describe how much I loved the new windows, or say, “Wow, an island bench in the kitchen!” because I knew what the result would be. Sure enough we spent the next 30 minutes staring at, and intently discussing, new bathrooms.

“I’m sorry, is there a less interesting room in the house I could go and lie down in? Because I’ve just come down with a dangerous case of boredom.”

Yes, I know that saying this will get me in trouble, and that I’m a horrible and socially inept person for not finding these discussions interesting, and I accept that, these days, our houses are often the entirety of our investment portfolio. But, frankly, listening to people bang on about their superannuation would be better.

And yes, I know I’m living in the past, but it’s nice here, and comfortable, and it doesn’t need a single bit of work done to it.