AT the risk of sounding like one of Monty Python's infamous Four Yorkshiremen (you know the ones: "We used to live in one room, all 26 of us, no furniture, 'alf the floor was missing, and we were all 'uddled together in one corner for fear of falling ..." "Eh, you were lucky to have a room.

We used to have to live in t' corridor..." "Oh, we used to dream of livin' in a corridor..."), I have inhabited some pretty grim places in my time.

As a callow, inky-fingered youth just starting out in this profession, I rented, with a couple of colleagues, a flat in Aberdeen which made the septic tank of Yorkshireman No 1's childhood seem like a mansion. It was so damp, we didn't have mice in the skirting board, we had tadpoles. A flatmate with a deft touch with a magic marker was able to turn the mould on the walls into a passable mural (if you closed one eye it resembled a map of the British Empire). There was no heating; and, after a frozen pipes incident, no toilet facilities for two months. The pub next door was a godsend in more ways than one.

There were a couple of other dwellings later on that were almost as grim (at least interior ablutions were possible). I shudder to think, then, what the 20-year-old me would have thought of the prospect of taking on Leonardo DiCaprio's flat; the fiftysomething me is gobsmacked as it is.

It has emerged that the actor's two-bedroomed New York apartment is being rented out at £15,000 per month (£14,990 more than I was paying back in the day). It not only has heating and a loo, it has one or two other amenities that would reward a keek through the keyhole.

To trump the luxury of a flushing toilet, it boasts a vitamin C-infused shower. This had me confused; do you drink the shower water to ward off a cold? No, it seems that vitamin C reduces the amount of residual chlorine, which promotes healthier skin and hair. So, there you have it: shower in orange juice and ward off dandruff.

It also has "posture-supportive heat reflexology flooring". This, as far as I can make out, involves a scattering of heated pebbles which "activate and support the muscular system". Not so very far, then, from our Aberdeen flat before its annual Hoovering.

Other attractions of the Greenwich Village pad include pumped-in aromatherapy, a built-in juicing station, endlessly-circulating purified air, and window box herbariums. However, there is no mention anywhere of there being a pub next door. Sorry, Leo, not interested.