Pyromania is an unfortunate affliction (you know, that obsessive desire to start fires). But after visiting a house this week, I kinda got the itch.

The couple have just come back from two weeks in Thailand, and sure enough, they’ve bought ‘indigenous’ furniture back with them.

They live in a Barrett-style home up near Summertown (thus proving that money and taste rarely go hand in hand) and whenever they travel, they told me, they can’t help but bring back a memento.

Now, for most of us, that might be a tea-towel or a small, porcelain donkey.

But for this couple, it’s clearly more likely to be a sideboard, a dining room table and chairs, or a wardrobe in faux mahogany.

Which means, in short, that their once chic, ideally located home looks more like a rainforest exhibit at London Zoo, what with its Buddhas, carved toucans and intricately laced candlestick holders crowding out their flat screen, sofa (woven cane from Nairobi, naturally) and the bathroom (swamped in carved coconuts).

So yes, when I visited, I couldn’t help but think that a controlled blaze, under the supervision of the local fire brigade, might indeed be best for all concerned.

But I’m a hypocrite because, bizarrely, it’s this need to ‘wear one’s life on one’s walls’ that I so adore about teenagers’ bedrooms.

It’s just, teens and students don’t hoard and display with such... smugness.

Hang out in a teenager’s room and their whole life is there – splattered across the door, plastered noisily on every square inch of space; their heart-throbs, their idols, their dreams.

It’s not about where they’ve been – it’s all about where they’re going.

You can spend a whole day in a student house, just eyeing the decor, and not once feel bored.

But try doing that in a suburban family home, furnished almost exclusively by the retail opportunities offered by low-cost airline routes, and you’d think the couple living there were as cloying and creepy as Bible-Belt evangelists.

Frustratingly, I know several couples in their seventies and eighties who have led extraordinary lives, and who could be forgiven for putting their lives on show – grandchildren and all – but whose living rooms suggest that the pinnacle of their existence so far has been... well, choosing cushion covers to match their slippers.

When I get to that age, I want my house, if nothing else, to be a shrine to everything I still want to do. Or be.

Just like any 17-year-old’s.

The walls littered with portraits of everyone I know, and admire and wish I was.

When they find me dead, as they surely will, and stand staring in wonder (or dread) at the walls around them, I’d consider it a compliment if they’d say: “Just who the hell did this guy think he was...? A student or something?”