The grown-up guide to... property porn
If you were to open our laptops and type in our passwords you would find porn. It would quickly become clear that we have a problem with porn. Porn that dulls the senses.
Porn that bleaches reality and makes human encounters less rich. Porn that makes you question what you have, and what you want, and whether anything you have genuine access to will ever be exciting enough. Exotic porn. Domestic porn. Porn. No word of a lie; we are obsessed.
And our search terms entirely depend on our state of mind at any given moment. Do we hope to feel humiliated, subjugated, appalled or inspired, powerful and all-conquering?
Welcome to the bleak world of property porn. Insidious, addictive property porn: the highway to dissatisfaction and self-loathing.
On an optimistic day, we look at houses that cost a third more than our properties would sell for. We visualise a remarkable financial year, the ability to upgrade while absorbing stamp duty into the equation and simultaneously reducing mortgage payments.
The location is a little less ‘real’; the kitchen a vast, elegant cooking/sitting/sprawling situation; there is a dressing room (imagine that) and a granny flat so that the children can never leave. There is a spare, spare bedroom that has ‘gym’ written all over it because the at-home office can be in the shed in the (non-overlooked) garden.
All this is in central London by the way – if we are talking rural porn then hand us that Country Life and let us examine those semi-statelys. Party barn anyone? Hairdressing salon? Pottery studio? Ping-pong room? Staff cottage (one day to be inhabited by those children who can never leave)? Hammam? Some days – those days when anything seems possible – we type ‘no max price’ into the search bar and really roll around in the mud.
On less confident days we look at flats for half the price of our current homes. Occasionally we experiment with a vast, tumble-down Bordeaux château or a rambling Hebridean farmhouse, but mostly it’s grubby places within a five-mile radius of where we live now.
These are the days when we feel a tiny bit hopeless, panicky, weighed-down rather than lit from within with possibility. This kind of porn reflects how we feel about our place in the world. Constant – often disheartening – reassessments. Not just what we deserve but what we need to be happy.
Sometimes we feel we’ve failed because we don’t have an en-suite bathroom. Other days we feel that we should let it all go: leap off the property bus and see what happens. We’ll never get back on, will we?
Our house is our pension. We’ll die on the streets surrounded by plastic bags stuffed full of property details muttering, ‘Well, that budget will get you a fourth bedroom, but forget about the underfloor heating… And is it near the railway line? Dirty.’
Most people we know have a slightly uncomfortable relationship with food. Whether clean eating to mask an eating disorder or trying diets that only serve to make them OBSESSED with their next feed, they define themselves – like toddlers – as ‘good’ or ‘naughty’ by what has passed their lips. We all do it.
But we also define ourselves as ‘in’ or ‘out’ of the game by where we live and, worse, where we might live one day. More. Boxes. To. Tick. More pressure. More porn.
Wanting it doesn’t make getting it any more likely. And getting it might not feel as good as property pornographers lead us to believe. Just as porn isn’t about real sex, property porn isn’t about real life. But we are both endlessly, bottomlessly compelled…
