"I DON'T give a damn how much your house is worth."

This message appeared in bold type across the front of a postcard sent by my sister back in 1989, when my husband and I bought our first home.

She still doesn't, probably because she's made a telephone number-like sum on her flat in London and could buy half our street with cash left over for a couple of luxury cars and four Kuoni holidays every year.

We are a nation obsessed with house prices.

I picked up the paper at the weekend. "My home earns more than I do" screamed the centre spread, comparing people's salaries with the amount their homes had made that year: Salary £18k/house £30k, salary £40k/house £100k, and so on.

In fact, if you open any newspaper on any day, you,re likely to read about how much homes have appreciated in the previous 24 hours, let alone 24 years or months.

My colleague, who exchanged contracts on his first house less than a month ago, joked: "It,s worth £2 million now."

The press has been awash with warnings that the bubble may be about to burst, that borrowers should take care not to over-stretch themselves. But they're missing the point. It's not low interest rates that are causing people to borrow too much - it's other home-owners.

That's where the problem lies. It's the incessant ramblings of a large section of the population who live, eat and breathe house prices. Property bores, that,s what I call them. They speak of little else, giving those who haven't got their feet on the so-called "property ladder" an inferiority complex.

You can,t escape it. Waiting for my daughter outside school last week, I was party to a conversation that went: "Eeeee, did you see what so-and-so from whatsit street sold their house for? That means ours must be worth..."

It,s all so pointless. People may feel like millionaires, they may feel smug and self-satisfied in the knowledge that they are sitting on so much wealth. What they forget is that every other house has also gone up massively. So when it comes to selling up and moving on, unless they,re planning on living in a static caravan in Walsall or emigrating to the Ukraine, they,re not going to be left with armfuls of cash to splash out on fast cars and weekends in Las Vegas.

A lot of people don,t even see their properties as homes any more, simply investments, and whatever improvements they decide upon are made because they add value, not necessarily because they,re needed. I,m currently planning a car port with stripped floors, ornate coving and an en-suite.

We pore over the property supplements that arrive with the evening paper. There may have been a drive-by shooting three streets away with two dead but, hey, they're asking more than £150,000 for that semi on the corner.

We sit down on an evening and watch property programmes on the television, people guessing how much houses are worth to win them. Twenty years ago such a tedious game show would have been confined to daytime television, now it,s primetime viewing.

It,s like a disease. No other country is so obsessed with house prices. Indeed, in many European countries, people rent all their lives and are perfectly happy to do so. My Dutch mother-in-law hates the idea of owning a home - she says it makes her feel tied down (I feel a Les Dawson-style joke coming on, but I,m going to resist).

Many of those who do rent will have the last laugh anyway, when we,re all forced to sell our homes to pay for blanket baths and liquid meals in old people,s homes.

If only the bubble would burst, if only people would shut up about the money they,ve made on their houses, if only they would shut up about what other people have made on theirs, if only I could get my hands on a T-shirt bearing the message on my sister's postcard...