Almost 20 of you were kind enough to send me a definition of "cor blimey trousers" when I asked for one last week. Before I explain the reason for the request, here is what I learned from the experience of asking:

Cor blimey trousers were pants commonly worn by dustmen (the British term for trash collectors) and coal merchants. They are trousers of corduroy (sometimes moleskin) - very baggy and tied just below the knee with string or rope. Those same materials were often used in lieu of a belt, although one correspondent recalled that the pants were held up by both a belt and braces (suspenders).

The term "cor blimey" or "gorblimey" is a euphemism for "God blind me", from the days when one did not take the name of the Lord in vain.

God, how times have changed. The expression is apparently the old-fashioned East End equivalent of saying "wtf?" or "cool" these days, which shows you just how far down the evolutionary scale we have slumped in the space of a few short years.

I now wish I'd had children for the first time in my life, so that if one of them said "wtf?" I could cuff him smartly round the ear.

Most of my informants sent me the same definition, derived from the Internet, and a few were surprised that I didn't know how to look things up on the web. Wtf? They're right in one sense: I know nothing. I look it all it up somewhere and then tell you about it.

The commonality of the response, however, leads me to believe that soon individual human beings will know nothing but what they read on Wikipedia, and if that happens, cor blimey. Bono wrote most of what's on Wikipedia, and he knows less than I do (hard as that is to believe).

But sincere thanks to everyone who wrote. The final thing I learned was that quite a few people read all the way to the bottom of these columns, which was an early Christmas present for me.

And now to why I asked about trousers, and what they have to do with the wonderful world of money.

If my luck has held, I will yesterday have completed (what tense is that? Past future conditional?) the purchase of an apartment in London. All my Dad's money and most of my own went into it, which has affected my perspective only to the extent that I'm broke, but overjoyed.

We tend to think of a home these days as an investment. Asked to describe it, we might say "It cost $75 million", or "It's a starter home, and I want to trade up to a better one in due course", or some such.

My view is different, and somewhat more detached (unlike the apartment, which is in a small block), partly because I'm not going to live in it just yet.

I will probably own the apartment until I die - or, given the way British death duties work, for a few years longer than that. In the interim, I don't much care whether its value goes up or down. I really don't. I would be no better off if its value were to increase, and no worse off if it fell. Come what may, it will always be worth one home, and will forever stand in much the same position relative to all other homes.

In case I'm being obtuse, I'll explain what I mean. I bought pretty much the cheapest home I could find in the district I wanted to be in. I believed in the real estate cliché: location, location, location.

Barring some grossly unlikely change in circumstances, it will always be the cheapest apartment in that district. But whatever happens to real estate prices (up, down or sideways), it should never lose its non-financial value, which in terms of homes is one.

Were I to want to move to a bigger home in that district, the value of my apartment alone would not let me do it. Were I to want to move to a cheaper district (i.e. almost any district in Britain), I might well be able to afford something nicer. But I have had emotional ties to St. John's Wood and its neighbouring districts since the day I was born - in a hospital about half a mile from the new apartment, as luck would have it.

Almost 50 years ago, a skiffle player (look it up on Wikipedia) called Lonnie Donegan sang a song, a Gaelic air to which he had written new lyrics. His version, according to one correspondent, was significantly cleaner than an earlier, sardonic version. Donegan's started thusly:

"Now here's a little story

(to tell it is a must)

about an unsung hero

who moves away the dust,"

(You can sing along, if you know the words.)

"Oh, My old man's a dustman;

he wears a dustman's 'at.

He wears cor blimey trousers

and he lives in a council flat."

The apartment that I bought is a council flat. (For non-English English speakers, the council is the local government authority and a flat is an apartment).

More precisely, like Monty Python's dead parrot, it is an ex-council flat, Margaret Thatcher having extended home ownership by selling council flats to those tenants who wanted to buy them at a discount. One such tenant bought this apartment and has now sold it to me without the discount.

Some friends thought it might be ironically humorous to buy me a pair of cor blimey trousers as a house-warming gift, but then we realised that none of us knew exactly what they were. Now we do.

I will have much to say, no doubt, on home ownership as the weeks unfold, but for now, one cold, hard fact has dawned on me: there are only two ways to become an adult in this world. One is to have children; the other is to own real estate. And so, in the spirit of what the Jewish people say to their 13-year-old boys, today I am a man. (In Jamaica, I believe they say: "Today, you are a mon".)

If I end up with a pair of cor blimey trousers, I'll see if I can persuade the editor into running a photo of me wearing them. But now, I must go out and do adult things. I think I'll start by committing adultery. See ya.