Greg Bruce considers the nature of love for a house and a city.
A couple of weeks ago, while we were staying at a nice holiday house in Mangawhai Heads, we noticed a place for sale five doors down. Zanna looked up the listing online and we fell instantly in love. It was a beautiful old barn, with decorative sacking, quality art and concrete floors, which would be perfect for easy elimination of sand brought in from the beautiful nearby beaches. We weren't in the market for a beach house in Mangawhai Heads, but nor were we not in the market.
A couple of days later, driving home from the beach, we saw they were having an open home. It seemed like a sign. I asked the agents what it was likely to go for and they said they never say because they're always wrong, but they gave me a list of recent sales of similar properties and, based on that, it seemed reasonable to think it would be about a million, which is money I neither have nor would be prepared to spend on a converted barn bach on a main road several minutes drive from the beach in a small settlement in Northland. So why couldn't I stop thinking about it?
I'd been to Mangawhai Heads a couple of times before but this was my first time staying there. It's a beach town and I hate beaches as a rule, but the weather was so nice and the beaches were beautiful and my kids loved the place so much it was hard not to feel the contagion of joy corrupting both my values and economic rationality. Friends with kids the same age owned a bach a few doors down and I imagined the idyllic summers we might spend over the coming decades, barbecues with our friends, the kids growing up with each other and going off to the beach together in the late afternoon while the adults lay around on the grass reading speculative fiction and getting tipsy.
The agents asked if we'd been in touch with our bank and I reflexively said yes. I think they knew I was lying but just in case they didn't, Zanna told them. We weren't going to buy the house, couldn't afford to buy the house, but I couldn't fight the feeling in my body that we must buy the house. It was a feeling driven by the twin forces of hopes and dreams. We had to have it. This feeling was so powerful that once it was in me, everything became possible and all barriers ceased to exist. It was a feeling that elevated my mood and made me a better person - more fun to be around, more outgoing, more generous, more understanding.
