I’ve never understood the point of giving, or leaving, one’s adult, able-bodied, intellectually capable children masses of money.

People in late middle age have hopefully earned their own living for several decades and don’t have the urgent need for an injection of cash that young people do.

My notion was that I would buy my children a small flat each when they became adults and that would be that - they could put their back-breakingly expensive education to use for the rest and be grateful.

This idea, always boldly optimistic given the chaotic state of my finances, now seems more hilariously improbable by the day: who on earth can afford to buy any kind of property in London? At the rate things are going, they’d be lucky to get a shed each - or, more realistically, their own shelf in a communal shed.

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The London property market

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• Property prices grow at slowest rate in five months

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No one is suffering as much as first-time buyers

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• First proof of decline in housing market

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Housing costs taking their toll

The question that always accompanies fresh data showing a fast-growing housing market is: are we headed for a crash?

Last week Knight Frank, the chartered surveyor, said London house prices rose by more than 33% in the 12 months to the end of April - the fastest rate of growth since mid1979. A house worth £100,000 in 1976 would now be worth more than £4.1m.

Data from Knight Frank also revealed that the supply of available property fell by more than 50% in the first quarter of this year, while the number of prospective new purchasers increased by 17%.

What with super-rich foreign buyers and City bonuses, the property market has gone mad, madder even than it was in the 1980s, so mad that there’s nothing anyone can do about it except throw up their hands in despair and wait for the crash that’s been predicted for a couple of years now but shows no sign of arriving, even though Jon Hunt, the founder and owner of the aggressive estate agency chain Foxtons, sold out last week for an estimated £390m.

The Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development has warned that UK property prices are among the most stretched of any major world economy, and that the housing market in Britain is overvalued by up to 65%. Surely something’s got to give because how - and where - are people supposed to live?

You have vendors on the one hand, beside themselves with joy to discover that their unexceptional house in an unexceptional area is now worth a monstrous sum.

But this doesn’t mean anything in real, rather than paper, terms, because property prices rise commensurately across the board, and the numbers are now so elevated that they become meaningless - like hedge-fund managers’ bonuses, we’re talking what for most people is unimaginable, joke money.

If your family house is now worth £1m and you want to move to a better area and have a bit more space, your £1m is going to get you nowhere: unbelievably, if you head for the “desirable”, more family-friendly parts of London, your £1m becomes risible.

You could just about go and buy a big house in Hackney, but that’s probably not quite what most people have in mind. Which means that once you’ve finished congratulating yourself on your acumen in buying your house for a fraction of the amount it’s now worth, you have to borrow punitive amounts in order to move “up the ladder”. Which wasn’t part of the plan.

This situation makes vendors incredibly greedy and buyers desperate. My sister and her husband, who have a young family, are trying to move house.

I went to look at one with her the other week. It was perfect. She knew the market is such that there was no time to have a think about it in a considered manner. Stressed out already, she put in a cash, no-chain offer at the asking price. Nothing happened for a few days. Eventually the estate agent languidly got back to her to say the vendors had turned down her offer.

Why, she asked. “They’ve just turned you down,” the agent shrugged, without giving a reason. “They also turned down a higher offer than yours.” And you do ask yourself: “What’s up with these people? Do they want to vend or do they not?”

If they want to sell, they should sell. If they greedily want to put up the price, they should greedily put up the price. If they’ve changed their minds, they should say so. But no, the house is still on the market, still being viewed, and offers are presumably still being turned down.

I thought this was maybe a one-off bit of peculiar behaviour, but no, it’s happening all over London.

Another friend is in the process of buying a house at an incredibly overinflated comedy price given its grotty location. She’s spent thousands of pounds on surveys and so on.

Two months down the line, the vendor calls her and says he’s noticed that other houses in his street are selling for £30,000 more than his asking price, so if she still wants the house, it’s just got more expensive. And if she doesn’t, there are plenty who do so could she let him know in the next half an hour? It’s absolutely unbelievable - and really craven.

I know HIPs - the home information packs the government was supposed to introduce on June 1 - have been much derided and that they were poorly thought out in the first place.

For instance, the idea (now abandoned) of a vendor commissioning a survey on the house he wants to sell was flawed from the start. But at least an attempt was being made at imposing some sort of order on a system that is out of control and open to wild abuse.

Nothing is being done to help potential buyers or to protect them from vendors suddenly announcing that the selling price has just gone up by tens of thousands.

More to the point, if you do an honourable job that makes a significant contribution to society - if you’re a nurse or a teacher, for example - for which you are paid a disgraceful and nationally shaming pittance, there is no way you could afford to buy anything larger than a cupboard in London.

Possibly you could buy a minute bedsit above a crack den - if you are lucky. Ludicrously, you’d have to beat other potential buyers off with sticks: that’s how desperate people have become. It’s mad.

In the absence of the widely predicted crash, an urgent attempt needs to be made at regulating the market, because given the way things are going, only the undeserving, bloated super-rich will be able to live in a city that is, after all, everybody’s.

india.knight@sunday-times.co.uk

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