We’ve been together for 40 years but I’m tempted to stray from my bank

So after the recent interest rate increases, my mortgage repayment has gone up by 133 per cent. Can any readers beat that? I should quickly clarify that the original repayment was very small indeed — otherwise we’d now be moving into the garden shed — so while the adjusted amount is more than twice what it was, it’s still not quite in breaking the bank territory. If you’re smelling a second mortgage, then your nose doesn’t deceive you.

Like a lot of other idiots, we bought a rental property during The Crazy Time. In fact, it was the bank’s idea. My memory may not be entirely reliable — I was essentially mainlining pink champagne back in those heady days — but after I’d made a respectable amount of money with my first play, I had a meeting with The Bank, in the course of which a woman in a lovely suit suggested that buying property was by far and away the best use of my time and money. She even offered to lend me a stupid amount of money to fund the folly.

In the end, we took a more modest sum and bought an apartment in Liverpool that would, we were promised, “wash its face.’ More than 15 years later, the only thing that has ever washed faces in my world remains the soap in the bathroom. Worse, although I am still paying the mortgage, I no longer own the property — a long and sad story for another day — and worst of all, I never even laid eyes on the wretched place. And now the bank wants me to pay more than twice as much for the pleasure.

So I phone them up and suggest they’ve made a mistake. Their agent is inclined to agree with me, but she needs to pass the matter to a colleague in the maths department (she doesn’t call it that, but in my head at least, that’s where it’s heading.) A couple of days later, a man calls from maths and tells me that their calculations are right and here’s the why.

Frankly, he loses me at hello. As he explains interest and principle and terms and carrying ones, it is all I can do not to shout ‘nerd!’ down the phone and hang up.

Instead, because I’m the eejit who has to pay it, I ask if I might convert the interest only loan — sold to me by the woman in the suit as the most tax efficient way of doing things back in the day — to a more conventional mortgage. He tells me what the repayments would be and I tell him I’ll pay off a chunk so that we can avoid the shed. They will need it all in writing, he tells me, so I write the letter that day.

Three weeks and one inflated repayment later, I still haven’t heard back from the bank. I phone them again and explain the whole palaver to another person, who confirms that my letter is on file and tells me somebody will call me back. A week later, I’m still waiting, so I call again. This time, the man to whom I explain my woes seems genuinely embarrassed, and types an email to maths or maths adjacent while I’m talking to him. He presses send before I hang up and tells me somebody will be back to me that day or maybe the next. Five days later I cancel the direct debit instruction to pay the mortgage.

Coincidentally, on the day the mortgage should have been paid, I get a letter informing me that I now have a new mortgage, the repayments for which are a hundred euro more than the ones I’d told the original maths man I couldn’t afford (I presume there had been another eight interest rises since our call.) I phone again, to ask about paying off the chunk I’d asked about paying off in that call, in my letter and in my two subsequent calls. No problem, says the woman, you can pay that in any branch.

I cycle down to my nearest branch where I can’t pay it because they’ve no cashier. The next day, I go to another branch where I queue for 35 minutes to finally make the payment and avert the shed. On my way out, a marketing person asks me to fill in a feedback survey, which is probably a mistake on their part.

Funnily enough, this same bank has a very clever ad campaign running at the moment about breaking up with your bank. To be honest, I couldn’t be bothered with all that. But after nearly 40 years together, we are officially going through a rocky patch.