Allowing yourself to daydream about the perfect home is one thing, but the romance is spoiled as soon as you open the door on to real world
My friend is trying to buy a flat in Bristol, and each time he sends me a link with a little question mark, I get a complicated rush. Looking at property websites has been an anti-pleasure of mine for many years now, and sometimes I browse as meditation, other times masochism, often as a sorbet-like palate cleanser before paddling into a crisis.
But this week the flat he was viewing had an oddness to it and it took a minute for me to work out what was wrong. I realised, with unsurprised shock, that the furniture was not of human size. The rooms had been staged – with a chest of drawers the width of a shelf, a single bed had been made up with two pillows to appear as a double, and so on – with a certain poetry. The decoration was to nobody’s taste, which I respect – pastel velvet cushions, many small and sharp-angled mirrors, a wide-backed chair masquerading as a sofa, a cheese plant instead of a wardrobe. The flat was furnished for an unhappy couple seen from a distance and still he was outbid, which is good because it means I can carry on looking.