Finally, after much protesting and equivocating, I have given in to that most wretched of babyboomer addictions: house-hunting. Yes, despite my frequent and very vocal defence of the rental sector, cowboy landlords and behaving fecklessly at all costs, I recently decided that I should maybe just have a little look at what's on the market. Truth be told, I was a little intrigued by the media hype and all those stories of people forced to buy dog kennels or small ditches for want of anything better. Or the stories of people who would just love to buy a dog kennel or a small ditch but are unable to raise the finance.
This was a whole new experience I had not yet explored and my journalistic juices started flowing. To put it a little more crudely, I got nosey. I wanted to see what all the fuss was about. I was dying to have a good poke around other people's houses, a pastime I haven't indulged since baby-sitting days. I felt left out because if you don't have a good scare story about basements that drip snot, bedrooms measuring two foot by four or solicitors absconding to the Isle of Man with your carefully saved deposit of £68, you have very little to contribute to conversation these days. If there's a new club, I want to know the secret handshake, even if all I plan to do is tell everybody what it is.
The problem is that like a lot of these rites of passage, nobody tells you exactly what you're meant to do. Like paying taxes or buying health insurance or visiting people in hospital, everybody assumes you know the ropes. While they're not difficult tasks per se, it's very difficult to ask the right questions, use the right terminology and display the proper etiquette when you've never done it before. When I popped into one estate agent on the spur of the moment, all I could think of to say was "I want to buy a house", a statement that was certainly to the point but perhaps a little self-evident in an estate agent. When they started throwing out trickier questions about financing, area codes, numbers of bedrooms and equity, I made a sharp exit, promising to have a good think about the four bedroom semi-d in Crumlin.
This rather traumatic experience set me back a few weeks so I decided to scale back my ambitions for my next sortie into the house-buying world, and just go along to one of those open house viewings. I opted for a house that I knew I couldn't afford, in an area I have always fancied living. Of course when I turned up to the viewing on a Saturday, it appeared I was not alone - there were so many people there to view, it looked like the vendors were having a having an impromptu street party. This melee was quite handy because if the estate agent had put me under too much scrutiny, I feel she might have detected I wasn't a serious buyer - I had come armed with two friends, a searing hangover, and a bad fit of the giggles.
These last only got worse as we trooped around the house, which was terrifying in the extreme. Rather than enticing the buyer with the smell of freshly baked bread, this particular house owner had decided to lace the atmosphere liberally with eau de damp. There was a huge Union Jack on the wall, several pictures of Princess Diana and a clutch of GAA memorabilia, all vying for wall-space with millions of little fragments of newspaper stuck to the wall with thumbtacks. All the viewers wandered round looking as though they had just seen a car crash; when I happened to meet somebody's eye in the kitchen we both exchanged a look that said "What are we doing here? This is a kip, and if that estate agent type tries to tell me I just need the imagination to see its potential, I'll stick her with one of those thumbtacks."
This is a fairly typical experience of house-hunting - for every pleasant, clean home you look around, there is also a clutch of astonishingly bizarre houses that look as though they've just been used as sets for either a Jim Sheridan film or a Beckett play. One friend described a house with a kitchen chair stuck to one wall which also sprouted a bit of coathanger. After staring at it transfixed for some moments, he realised the owner must have hung the phone on the coathook and sat staring into space while talking - but what was he or she doing with their hands? Then there was another friend who saw a place where all the tins of food on the shelves were placed exactly two inches apart; she didn't divulge whether she had been tempted to move them all slightly out of place. I know I would.
After I'd mastered a bit of the lingo - at least to the extent that I could go "Aah yes" when the estate agent talked of somewhere "going to tender" or "best and final offer" - I started to actually imagine buying places. This whole process began to intrigue me. It's like a massive game of make-believe indulged in by otherwise rational adults, whereby you walk around somebody else's house going "Well of course I'd put the television there," or "I'm delighted to see we have a nice skylight in the larder cupboard". Then you start discussing whether the bank is close enough, whether there are adequate children's schools in the area and where your friends would park when you have your first dinner party.
In other words you have to imagine your whole life for years to come in a place that you have looked at once or twice. Then you have to make up your mind whether you want that future in a matter of days. As a friend's mother pointed out, it's a little like dating was in the 1940s - if a boy asked you out to a dance you had yourself married with several children and a house in Drumcondra before he even knocked on the front door. You have to do this to imagine the possible pitfalls and advantages to a house you might possibly buy, but what happens is you begin to believe you actually live in it.
When the price goes too high or somebody else outbids you, your imaginary future suddenly falls apart. You feel rather flat for a while and then something else comes along and you start the whole process again - usually completely contradicting yourself in the process. You say things like "Well of course it doesn't matter if I don't have a garden", when just two weeks earlier you were loudly talking about how you were going to take up topiary in your new home. You find yourself rather sheepishly scuttling back to new developments after dismissing them because your previous dream home was an old terrace.
In fact, truth be told, the process of looking for a house is not unlike looking for a partner in the year 2000, never mind the 1940s. As you search, you use the same mixture of optimism, blind hope and invention, to convince yourself this is right for you. You try to use the right terminology, go to the right places, make yourself available at the right times. And when it doesn't work out, you sit and comfort yourself with the flaws - the rising damp, the bald spots, the arrogance or the dodgy neighbours. Then you either start all over again or else you give up on this permanent commitment thing and go back to the short-term lease. Now if only they had open viewing days for the opposite sex . . .
Louise East can be contacted at wingit@irish-times.ie