The late, great Peter Cook once asked a young man at a party what he did for a living. “I'm writing a novel,” the youth declared, loftily. “Really?” Cook replied. “Neither am I.”

I felt like shouting the same thing last week when I read an extraordinary claim in The Times: that someone is about to redevelop Battersea power station. Really? Neither am I! It's not possible. Never has been. Never will be. Battersea power station is to British life what the statue of Ozymandias was to Shelley: a crumbling artefact left over from a bygone civilisation that invites us only to look on its works ... and despair.

Over the past 25 years, since Europe's largest brick edifice stopped generating electricity, I have watched redevelopment plans for Giles Gilbert Scott's incredible hulk rise and fall with such excruciating inexorability that I now know how victims of Chinese water torture felt. First, as older readers will recall, a man called John Broome was going to transform Battersea into a theme park. That was until the estimate rose from £35 million to £200 million in a single year. The scheme sank without trace.

Then the site was bought by the Hwang family, one of those feisty Hong Kong business dynasties. Their first notion was to turn Battersea into an entertainment complex involving an improbable alliance between Warner Cinemas and Cirque du Soleil. That dream lasted all of ten minutes. Whereupon they decided that the Grade I listed wreck was going to be turned into 750 homes, two hotels and a conference hall. This vision also faltered. So the Hwangs announced that Battersea would instead become “an arts destination to rival Tate Modern and the Royal Opera House”.

That was in 2006. Two years later, guess what? No homes, no hotels, no alternative Tate, and no Hwangs. Now it's some Irish developers announcing “exciting plans” for Battersea. And very eye-popping they are. Instead of 750 homes on the power station site, there will be 3,200! Plus a shopping-mall. (Naturally; it's a scandal that London has only 200 malls already.) Plus a 1,000ft glass tower designed by a trendy architect, presumably so that people in south-west London don't feel deprived when they see the phallic monstrosities going up in Canary Wharf and the City.

The developers say that they are expecting to have all this built by 2020. To which the only response is: “Really? Neither am I”. I just hope a small earthquake hits Battersea. Nothing serious; no injuries. Just enough to topple a superannuated power station and bring this tedious 25-year saga to an end.

But the Battersea story does usefully highlight one of the most infuriating (or, depending on your viewpoint, endearing) facets of British life. It's our naive willingness to believe - or at least devote acres of newsprint to - grandiose plans that are clearly not going to come to fruition in a century of Sundays. Where would the urban mythology of London be, for instance, without Crossrail? This is the long-mooted train line from Heathrow to the East End. How long has it been “in the pipeline”? Well, I can remember preparatory digging in Oxford Street when I had my first job in London, and that was back in the 1970s. Now the Government says that it could be built by 2015. Yes, and Jerusalem could be built in England's green and pleasant land, too. But I wouldn't put money on it.

Wise Londoners treat heartwarming announcements about the “upgrading” of the Tube in the same way - not so much with a pinch of salt as a lorry-load of the white stuff. Brighton's residents must have similar feelings when they hear of the latest scheme to “save” the West Pier. And airline passengers, too, when they read that Heathrow airport will be the model of efficiency when it has been allowed nine runways, 19 terminals and flights taking off and landing 39 hours a day. Back in the “heyday” of the Soviet Union, I imagine, Stalin's five-year grain-harvest targets were greeted with much the same scepticism - though possibly the guffaws of incredulity were slightly more muted.

But it's not just in public life that pie-in-the-sky projects are conjectured, planned, promised ... and never delivered. Which of us doesn't have a Battersea power station lurking in our own home? It's that junk-crammed garden shed that we will definitely, when we get a spare weekend, convert into a summerhouse. It's the rowing-machine that we purchased, in a spurt of theoretical bodybuilding enthusiasm, at Argos in February 2006 - and somehow not had time to use since March of the same year. It's the loft that would make a great playroom for the kids, if only we could face sharing six months of physical and emotional carnage with a bunch of builders.

As T.S.Eliot put it in The Hollow Men: “Between the desire and the spasm, between the potency and the existence, between the idea and the reality...falls the Battersea Moment.” Well, he didn't quite write that. But it's what he meant. Battersea Moments are hard-wired into the human psyche. Yes, a man's gotta dream. But that's no guarantee that he's gotta haul himself out of his armchair, switch off the footie, and actually do something about it. And much the same thing holds true in the world outside your front door. Some things in life just aren't destined to happen. A thriving residential and leisure complex stuck between four decrepit chimneys next to the Thames is one of them. If so much as a single flat is built inside Battersea power station by 2020 - or 2030, for that matter - I will personally hire a squadron of airborne pigs to perform a ceremonial fly-past.

That's my plan, anyway.