There was a post on X the other day from somebody asking middle-aged folk like me to name something we all took for granted in our twenties that seems like a luxury now and the answers – hundreds of them – almost all said the same thing: buying your own home. You don’t need me to tell you there’s now a big divide on property between anyone born before 1990 or thereabouts and anyone born after, and some new figures show just how wide the divide has become.

What the figures show is that over the past decade the total number of residential dwellings in Scotland has increased by eight per cent, or 189,000, to 2.7million, which is good news for a country that badly needs more residential dwellings. But the really interesting bit is the figure showing that 35% of the homeowners in Scotland have two or more spare bedrooms, which is also up five points on ten years ago. It means there’s a whole swathe of homeowners who have houses that are effectively too big for them. They have Too Many Rooms (TMR). They are the TMR generation.

I realise of course that lots of older people are not in this happy situation and either don’t have enough space or don’t own property at all – TMR, like the idea of rich Boomers, is just shorthand for part of the generation. Many would also deny their houses are too big and indeed lots of people did deny it when Nationwide compiled the figures, perhaps because some of them are using one of their spare rooms to work from home.

But a couple of underlying trends seem to be at work here. First, younger couples planning to have a larger family and second, older people who aren’t willing or ready to downsize and I would include myself in that second group. I am thinking of downsizing into a smaller place at some point relatively soon, but in the........

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