Before I visit a UK region or a foreign country, nothing annoys me more than a telephone call from a press officer or letting agent who, having read Property Week’s forthcoming features list, asks: ‘You know you have this feature coming up about Swindon/Cardiff/Stoke-on-Trent: are you actually going there?’
‘Of course,’ I answer brightly, stifling the urge to ask: ‘Is everything I write so flat that it reads like something plagiarised from the internet or the local newspapers?’
There is never any substitute for being there.
I won’t accept retail agents’ reassurance that a shopping centre is trading fabulously, until I have visited it myself to make sure that it is not a case of shuttered units, three charity shops and a kiosk selling dried flowers.
In Moscow, there is definitely no substitute for being there.
No one is certain what is going on.
You ask about a building site where work has stopped, and a knowledgeable office agent will say that maybe the contractors really are waiting for the cladding to arrive, or equally the developer may have run out of money.  
It is safer to write nothing.
But one development I could not miss was White Gardens, because AIG/Lincoln was on site with the office development below my bedroom window at the Holiday Inn. 
When I say on site, I mean that workers revved up their drilling and digging equipment at 6am and reluctantly turned off the last switch at 10 pm. 
The squeak squeak squeak to warn of an on-coming truck and the thud thud thud of driving down piles was continuous. 
If I had been in Moscow for any reason other than to look at property development, I might have asked the Holiday Inn manager for a quieter room.  
Instead I was mesmerised. 
In the space of a week, I witnessed the beginning of a steel superstructure.
It was a piece of good luck, because my requests to visit building sites were refused. 
In fact, walking off piste is a risk in Moscow.
Having paid by 300 roubles to visit the walled enclave of the Kremlin, guards blew whistles at me whenever I strayed from the pedestrian crossings in to the empty car-free grounds.
I left.
Outside the walls, I observed a mounted policeman and a mounted policewoman on ceremonial duty. 
The horses stood to attention while their riders flirted. 
He smoked a cigar. 
She smoked a cigarette.
If they can smoke on duty, why can’t a tourist wander freely?
There is no substitute for being there – even if it doesn’t give you any answers.

John Sargent, photo : P.A

I’m considering contacting John Sergeant to ask to take his place on Strictly Come Dancing.
I can’t dance, but neither can he. The request would have symmetry, because 30 years and three weeks ago, John telephoned me. I had difficulty in reaching across the bed to the portable telephone at St Mary’s Hospital, Paddington, because I was stiff, having just given birth to a daughter a few hours before.

A month earlier, John and I had been colleagues in the BBC offices in the House of Commons. I had a job; he was on secondment from the newsroom.

In 1978, our desks faced each other. We should have been talking about the rise of Margaret Thatcher, but we talked about parenthood. I already had a son, and John would tell me about his babysitting co-operative in Ealing. It all sounded strictly unglamorous.

Ealing parents kept account with bottle tops on their babysitting duties. With the self-deprecation we loved on Saturday nights, he told me that when he turned up to babysit at one house, the parents decided to take their child with them to the party.

My first thought from my hospital bed on hearing John’s congratulations was: ‘What good colleague.’ That vanished with his second sentence: ‘Are you coming back to work?’
I looked down at the defenceless, sleeping baby, and replied: ‘No, John, you can have my job.’

It was a split-second decision. If she had been fractious or crying, I might have said: ‘Keep my seat warm. I’m coming back in April.’In that case, John may never have been thrust aside live on camera by an embattled Margaret Thatcher at the Paris summit or entered Strictly Come Dancing.
The object of my decision is now married, has a first class degree in medicine from Oxford, is a registrar at Hammersmith Hospital, researching obesity for a PhD.

Perhaps John should meet her. She tells me that when she had children I am the mainstay of her childcare programme, and so what John started in me may be repeated.

In the meantime, as thousands in property lose their jobs, I ponder the random nature of gaining and rejecting work. I have never been the successful candidate when I have filled in pro forma job applications and gone for first and second interviews. Chance meetings work better. I am only working at Property Week because I met Jim Gardner, the news editor of Chartered Surveyor Weekly, at a Jones Lang Wootton party.

My advice to those job-hunting: a cheeky well-timed telephone call may work wonders.

I had a dawn bus tour of Swansea on 23 October.

It was too cloudy for a blinding sunlight to rise from the bay.

But Swansea at dawn stands up to comparison with any other UK city.

The bus collected me from the Dragon Hotel, whipped down to the Marriott at the Maritime Quarter and finally to Morgans Hotel, the conversion of the old port authority building.

The five-star hotel was the venue for christening parties by Swansea ex-pat Catherine Zeta-Jones.

I wanted to peer in to see the clever conversion.

Unfortunately, by the time we reached Morgans, the bus driver hardly bothered to stop.

His brief was to wait for five minutes at Swansea’s five top hotels to collect delegates for the WalesRegeneration Summit and to drive them the two miles to the summit Liberty Stadium.

He arrived at my hotel at 7.25 am with no passengers having called at the Premier Inn.

‘I expect they’re all having a lie-in,’ he said generously. ‘They’re waiting for my second run.’

We waited in silence while a disc jockey on the radio discussed the life and bad times of Kerry Katona.

Half an hour later, I arrived at Liberty Stadium the only passenger in a 50-seater coach.

I have no idea whether the coach was more popular an hour later.

Somehow, 300 delegates made their way to Swansea.

As with all conference these days, there were plenty of green statistics.

The irony of the coach was not lost on me.

How much had my shapely carbon footprint been elongated by being the only passenger on a 50-seater coach?

I am sure the Welsh Assembly Government, the organisers of the summit, has all its green credentials in place, turning off lights and outlawing standby buttons.

But before organising another shuttle bus at taxpayers’ expense, it should check with delegates to make sure they are green enough to travel by coach.

Like all journalists, I try to circumvent the brush-off from an official spokesman by taking a direct approach.

In retail reporting, that means,  telephoning a branch of a chain store to ask anyone who answers the phone: ‘When’s your last day of trading?  I want to come to the closing down sale.’

The answer is often: ‘We’re not closing down.’  This is followed by a yell across the shop: ‘No one’s said we’re closing down, have they?’

The last time I received this response was from Talbots in Regent Street, where closure and replacement by LK Bennett had already been reported in the trade press.

Why had no one told the staff that Talbots was retreating to the United States?

Like anyone in property journalism, I have been faced with a dilemma, after an agent has said: ‘We’ve got the unit on the market, but you can’t write anything, because they haven’t told the staff.’

Why not?

Invariably, I practice self-censorship because to me it is just a paragraph in Property Week and a chance to bargain-hunt; for the agent it is just a fee for lease assignment. For shop workers it is redundancy.

As the economy weakens, I expect to face this dilemma many times in the coming months, just as I did in the early 1990s. Then I telephoned the Birmingham office of Erdman Lewis to find out about the office closure, only to find no one knew the office was closing.

In Paignton last month, the woman at the Somerfield check-out was talking frantically to her customers about the future. She read the newspapers.  She knew that the Co-op had bought Somerfield, but no one had told her about future employment.

As a journalist this may sound self-defeating, but, my plea to retailers and other employers is:  don’t let me find out that you are closing a shop or office before you tell the staff.