Boffins at Queen Mary’s, London, are wandering round in white coats trying to find out “how people can develop a long-term relationship with artificial creatures, in everyday settings”.

That’s robots to you and me – digital servants who’ll help ’round the house, befriend the lonely, and plug into the web to take care of dreary domestic chores like ordering groceries online.

Professor Peter McOwan of Queen Mary’s explains:

“What we hope to do is produce something within which you feel there is something you’re bonding with.”

Errr … right. Like what?

First off the production line is Kaspar, a child-sized humanoid robo-boy who, it says here, “is capable of facial expressions and can play baby games such as peek-a-boo”.

Kaspar is designed to interact with kids, but I’m not so sure I’d want him around the house. I mean, look at him. Old Kaspar – Chucky remodelled as a red-neck survivalist – is terrifying.

Turn your back and before you know it he’ll be coming after you with the bread knife.

You’ll be hiding under the bed. You’ll hear his little robot feet pitter-patter down the hallway. The door will creak open. A tiny shadow will flit across the carpet. Then his mad little mug will stare you straight in the eye, and these, I promise you, will be the last words you’ll ever hear: “Peek-a-boo! I can seeee you!”

Think I’m overreacting? Well, listen to Kaspar’s creator, Professor Kerstin Dautenhahn of the University of Hertfordshire:

“We want to avoid a situation where a person deeply bonds with a robot, but the robot simply doesn’t care.” (Interview with Personal Computer World).

Terminator, Robocop, Alien, Blade Runner, I, Robot, The Matrix … we all know how this ends …

If sleep is something you can do without, here’s a video of Kaspar.

Why do robots like this freak us out? Theorists have talked about the Uncanny Valley, more here.

If, like me, you set aside all worldly concerns, switch off your phone and dim the lights whenever Grand Designs is on, then perhaps this little quiz based on the wit and wisdom of Kevin McCloud will take your fancy.

As much as I pretend it’s the struggle of turning, say, an old war bunker into a subterranean palace, that has me tuning in week after week, I must confess it’s the lure of the McCloud himself that sets my frontal lobe alight.

The man may take brow-furrowing to new extremes, but his one-liners are smoother than George Clooney in a dinner jacket and capable of cutting deeper then Anne Robinson on a bad day.

So, being a writer with an acute sense of my own limited vocabulary, that’s why I watch… for the words and stuff.

Anyway, back to the quiz, which makes you match up quotes from our beloved Kev to the context in which he said them. No problemo, thought I, the maestro of McCloudisms. Needless to say, I was rubbish.

You can see if you fare any better here:

http://www.channel4.com/microsites/Q/quizzes/kevins-quotes/quiz_init.jsp

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Recently I wrote about the ultimate in avian accessories, a Richard Meier inspired birdhouse, the apogee of modern living for birds.

Or so I thought.

Apparently that’s just not good enough for our feathered friends.

“Inspired?” choked my friend Sid the sparrow as we shared a seedcake the other day, “Inspired?!? That’s not flappin’ good enough! I spent five years, chick and bird roosting in the Pompidou and I want, nay demand authentic modernism, not some watered down, ‘inspired by’ junk!”

Apoplectic with fury he fairly choked on a sesame seed, which – if you’ve never seen a sparrow choke – is quite a sight.

Anyway, after he’d calmed down a bit, muttering something about ‘machines for living’, I pointed him in the direction of Austrian architects Raumhochrosen who have taken “Four examples of the remarkable development of the recent history of Vorarlbergian architecture” as inspiration for their range of architectural birdhouses.

“The hardships of the search for asthetical birdshouses do have an end!” proclaims their lost-in-tranlationist brochure, “Communicating wildlife to architecture-fiend!”

Now I’m not entirely up to speed on my Voralbergian architecture, but I am somewhat of an architecture fiend and these tick all my (bird)boxes.

Based on the architectural plans of real houses they’re lovingly recreated, in 1:33 scale, using the same kind of wood as the originals and would make a great living space for our feathered friends.

Sid obviously thought so too. He’s put a downpayment on the “Vorarlberger Baukünstler” and moves in next month.

I’ve just discovered what happens when you finally pull the cork from a bottle of pent up housing market fury. The results are colourful, to say the least.

At first I was rendered speechless (and nearly blind) by this teletext-inspired nightmare – a creation, I suspect, that was fuelled by late night Pro Plus binges with Jefferson Airplane’s greatest hits stuck on repeat.

Scrolling through the multi-coloured splurge, I finally got to the real nitty-gritty, in all its lime green glory.

The site, it seems, is a Dayglo assault on STRs – shorthand for those who sell-to-rent, or, as this webmaster would have you believe, the housing market’s very own spawn of the Devil.

The theory behind sell-to-rent is that you sell up when the market is at its peak but heading for a fall, rent in the meantime and then buy back when prices are lower.

And despite this webmaster’s unreserved dismissal of good taste, and most forms of punctuation, there is the odd nugget of truth:

“There will have to be at least a 20 per cent reduction in house prices just in order for the STRs to break even when buying a property to cover the transaction costs involved like stamp duty, estate agent and solicitors fees.”

Okay, that actually sounds quite well-informed – we said something similar ourselves only a few weeks ago – but this: “The STRs are deceitful, lying, greedy scum,” not so much.

The site has been untouched since the summer of 2006, before the credit-crunch, the price falls, the pulled mortgages et al.

So who knows what’s become of our visionary’s state of mind since then. For everyone’s sake I hope he is lying in a darkened room, maybe with a vitamin-shot wielding nurse on standby.

I’ve since recovered the full use of my eyes, but have yet to decide if this website is the work of a hidden genius or just the insane ramblings of a madman. What do you think?

Love-them-or-hate them design duo, Colin and Justin, made a fleeting appearance on lunchtime tv the other day.

You can always rely on the marmite couple for a cutting but quotable comment and true to form, they didn’t disappoint.

The object of their mockery on this occasion was fellow self-proclaimed interiors expert, Ann Maurice, presenter of the House Doctor tv series.

Colin and Justin clearly aren’t fans. The Witch Doctor, one of them calls her, quickly correcting his “slip of the tongue” just in time to avoid a lawsuit (she is American, after all).

Their basic gripe is that “she’s painted Britain beige.” Warming to their well-rehearsed and brilliantly bitchy theme, they launch into a diatribe about the poor woman’s crimes against colour.

It’s all down to her, they insist, that Britain’s homes are painted in neutral shades encompassing every shade of bland from “bone or pebble to clotted cream”.

“Dull, dull, dull,” they shriek gleefully. They have a point.

But the boys are determined to combat this tedious neutrality and reintroduce colour to the nation’s homes: “We’re like a decorating douche; a designer enema flushing out all that cream; we’re Prozac with a paintbrush.”

Glaswegian design queens: loving your work.

With the credit crunch still in full swing and the whole sub-prime debacle continuing to generate gloomy headlines, a little light relief might be no bad thing.

And who better to cast a witheringly hilarious eye over the whole subject than Bird & Fortune?

Below is a piece they did for The South Bank Show, and it’s an absolute belter. Enjoy!

A recent survey by Halifax proclaimed the death of the great British Dining Room:

Everyone, it seems, is into kitchens now – especially kitchens that open out onto gardens. Such things sell houses.

I’m clearly way behind on this. Last Christmas, one of my best friends bought me a chalkboard emblazoned with the legend “I only have a kitchen because it comes with the house”, a gift no doubt inspired by an incident that had taken place a few months earlier.

Brought on by my constant wailing about being utterly useless on all things culinary-related, the same friend – a natural in the kitchen herself – offered to do a step-by-step guide to cooking a Sunday roast whereby she’d instruct and I’d create.

It wasn’t the most promising start. “Do you have a roasting pan or would you like me to bring mine?” she’d phoned up to enquire. “What’s a roasting pan?” I squawked, panic-stricken and confused.

An hour later she arrived with the appropriate roasting apparatus, as well as half the kitchen utensils known to womankind, and a chicken. I’d forgotten that part, too.

Under her patient tutelage and cooking-by-numbers approach, I managed the entire process without too much difficulty, although I must admit, I didn’t particularly enjoy inserting half a lemon in the poultry’s posterior.

But, shaky beginnings and a lack of suitable ovenware aside, my inaugural attempt at cooking a roast was deemed a success and, even better, no one died or was rushed to casualty soon after.

Sadly, I can’t say that I’ve followed up on my triumph and attempted a solo effort as yet – but my dining room is staying firmly intact just in case.

So, Mike’s scarily believable April Fools piece about the trials and tribulations of Phil Spencer garnered a fair amount of feedback, not just on FindaProperty.com but also over on the forums of our arch-nemesis Housepricecrash.co.uk.

Mostly the joke was well-received, but one comment in particular stuck out; posted by Super Ted (possibly not his real name):

“A quality April Fools, nice to see some of these property spivs have a sense of humour.”

Ah, Mr Ted – or can I call you Super? – how well you know us. It’s true, we are all slick, sharp suited, spivs over here at FAP Towers.

Why, only this morning as I was brylcreeming my moustache I was wondering, given the current state of the UK housing market, if it wasn’t time for a bit of black-marketeering, house-selling shenanigans.

Cut to: somewhere in Surrey, a shady character sidles up and whispers,

“Psssst! Wanna buy a Huf Haus? Fell orf the back of a lorry just yesterday. Half the price yer’d pay dahn the high street.

“Normally ’alf a mil, but I’ll take £250K cos I likes yer face. Yeah? You innerested? Quick now, before the rozzers spot us!”

Sorted! Skip the HIPs and avoid inheritance tax – just don’t expect a receipt.

I was in a taxi the other evening making a big effort to increase my carbon footprint (difficult when you don’t have a car, but I try to make up for it by not recycling).

Anyway, the driver was Polish – a sort of thoughtful, well educated and very polite Travis Bickle with a Masters in electronic engineering.

He’s spent the past three years on the mean streets of Brighton, and as we drove along he cast a rueful eye over the more risqué cavortings of our friskier local residents (“Is crazy,” he muttered.)

Britain has been great, he said, but he was planning to go home, as were many of his friends. The Polish economy is on the rise, jobs are more plentiful and better paid, and you get fewer zloty to the pound now than you did a few years ago.

This, I’m extremely sorry to say (I’m seeking professional help), brought to mind the latest ARLA missive on buy-to-let.

The people at ARLA seem to be fairly upbeat, and a good deal of their optimism is based on the following:

“Increased demand is being driven in part by immigration. Across the country, the average proportion of properties taken by immigrants through ARLA members is 20 per cent. More than 16 per cent of these are from the European Union.”

You see where I’m going with this? There are, by some estimates, 1,000,000 Poles in this country. What will happen to ARLA’s happy landlords if they, and the other Eastern Europeans, go home?

One would imagine it can only have a negative impact on the investment market, albeit in quite a localised way. Or am I missing something here? Let me know.

Phil Spencer’s Location, Location, Location is unknown. The TV presenter has been taken into police protection following violent threats from frustrated first-time buyers.

Spencer, famed for his sotto voce whispering to the camera on Channel 4’s Location, Location, Location, is believed to be in hiding – possibly in a city centre pied-a-terre during the week and a pretty Costwold cottage at the weekend.

But rather than living the “best of both worlds” dream, Phil is enduring a property presenter’s worst nightmare after a militant splinter group from housepricecrash.co.uk threatened to  relocate him to an undisclosed council estate in the North of England.

A letter to the presenter – accompanied by a harrowing virtual tour of the run-down estate – warned that Spencer’s recent comments in the Sunday Telegraph were “the final straw”.

“Spencer,” the letter reads, “believes the market will recover in the spring. He thinks now is a good time to buy. He’s still convinced that lack of supply will underpin the market.

“When someone like Phil Spencer can keep peddling this tripe, trying to convince more people to pile into a market he has already helped to hype well beyond its worth, well, he’s just asking for trouble.

“Morally he should stop preaching and spend more time thinking about the harm he will have helped to cause to thousands of families across the country.

“If he refuses to shut his trap and get his smug mush off the telly we’ll relocate his ass with extreme prejudice. Phil, you smarmy snake oil property porn merchant, we know where you live (you paid too much for it), and we’re coming to get you. In an unmarked Mini Cooper.”

Police say the letter was accompanied by the virtual tour and a 40-page document with graphs, spreadsheets and a complex explanation of why a house price crash was inevitable.

“We’re taking this extremely seriously,” said Scotland Yard. “The accompanying documents are clearly the work of a disturbed mind. Only a nutter would argue that a crash is inevitable. Haven’t they ever heard of micro-markets?”

Kirstie Allsopp, Spencer’s co-presenter of Channel 4’s Location, Location, Location, is said to be “extremely cross”.