Heathrow Airport employs 56,000 people so there are plenty of potential buyers who would like to live near their work.In a nice twist, John is one of those rare estate agents who practises what he preaches: he also lives underneath the flight path “I love planes,” he says. “When Concorde goes over I still run out in the garden to have a look because it’s beautiful.”Matching people to “difficult” houses can leave estate agents with their work cut out Yet you never know what bizarre factor will clinch a sale. Simon Agace, chairman of Winkworth estate agents, recalls matching a difficult house with the perfect owner. “It was on a busy corner junction, and the family bought it specifically for their mother because she was half deaf,” he says.This location business is fine if you are aware of the drawbacks that come with a property. But like the Balchins, who a fortnight ago won the latest round in their legal battle with the Department of Transport over a bypass that would render their pounds 435,000 property “valueless”, Anne Collins had no idea when she bought her 1930s semi on a slip road off the A10 in north London in 1986 that it was going to turn into a booming dual carriageway “It was fairly quiet back then,” she recalls. “There were cars but there wasn’t the volume there is now.”About five years ago, she and her husband decided they’d had enough of the dirt, the ear-splitting roadworks and the windows rattling every time a lorry passed and decided to sell. It took them a year.”People liked the house but they didn’t like where it was,” says Anne.

“We had to drop our price by about pounds 10,000 in the end.” Unlike the Balchins, Anne found her perfect buyer: a mechanic who loved the double garage. Like many buyers, the mechanic and his wife were desperate to leave their small flat and find a house with a garden. If they had to put up with the A10, so be it.Offloading an attractive property in an unattractive location is becoming easier as the property market picks up across the country. During a slump, even families desperate for space wouldn’t necessarily consider a house on a main road. But certain areas, such as London and many parts of the south, are filling up, leaving too many buyers for too few properties.

Suddenly that main road doesn’t seem to be such a hindrance.It’s not the roads but the utter lack of them that’s the problem for Sandra Ashenford and her family. There are three ways of reaching their old bridgekeeper’s house and its acre of garden on a canal near Stroud in Gloucestershire: rowing across the canal; walking up the towpath to the next bridge and doubling back; or by crossing a field at the back. Because of the lack of vehicular access, no bank or building society would lend on the property and they had to raise the pounds 80,000 themselves.”To us it was wonderful, but to building societies it was worthless,” says Sandra. The beauty and solitude of the place more than make up for drawbacks such as having to carry the shopping in a wheelbarrow and the reluctance of delivery men to trek across the field – they had to lug sofas and beds by themselves.

Similarly, when Sandra was expecting her third child, she had to drag herself across the field in the middle of labour.The Ashenfords plan to stay forever, so reselling the property is not a concern. And although Sandra has become somewhat obsessed with the weather, she has no regrets. “I think we’re far too cossetted in the way we live these days,” she says. “People aren’t prepared to take a few risks.”Some of these stories feature in a new series of ‘All The Right Moves’, beginning Thursday 17 June at 8pm on BBC2..

As Finland’s President Martti Ahtisaari warned, slight- ly but charmingly misrendering an old proverb amid otherwise faultless English: “The proof of the pudding is when you eat it.” And, he might have added, never more so than when one of the cooks bears the name of Slobodan Milosevic. But let us suppose for an instant that every ingredient of the Kosovo dish, whose recipe was accepted with quite astonishing alacrity in Belgrade last week, proves perfect. Russian nationalists don’t pull the rug from under Viktor Chernomyrdin. China and Russia do not obstruct passage of a clear-cut Security Council resolution at the United Nations. The quarrel over partition, masked or otherwise, of the province, quickly subsides. And finally, the Yugoslav president does not prevaricate and procrastinate – as is his wont – over his undertakings to Messrs Ahtisaari and Chernomyrdin.
Even then the restoration of something approaching normality in Kosovo will be one of the lengthiest, costliest, and most risk-fraught enterprises in the political history of late 20th century Europe.The initial step was due to be taken yesterday, with the first direct contacts between the Yugoslav army high command and Nato officials.