Intrusion

I was looking inside a rental house today, because we have to leave our current address soon. I've been determinedly looking for a new home for the last three or four weeks and today was about house number seven or eight that I'd been through. It's an exhausting process, especially with all the driving around town and all the calling/meeting agents to gain access to the houses, not to mention the application process and all the paperwork that that entails. I had got to the point that if I had to walk through one more over-priced dump, I was ready to call suburban living quits and go pitch a tent in our local park.

Thankfully, the house was not an over-priced dump and after putting in our application, it looks like we can move in soon. In a couple of weeks, the real fun will begin,having to pack all our shit once again. You'd think that being in the habit of moving house every 12 months, as has been the case for the last 5 years, that we would be well-prepared for another move, except that this time it has only been nine months since the last move and I barely feel like we've settled into this place.

The reason we have to move is a painful story to say the least, suffice to say that our landlord is in no position financially or otherwise to be renting out this over-priced disaster of a house and that we must have had the starry-eyed look of those just escaped from the ghettos of Gold Coast boganville when we arrived, that we signed a lease without really giving it a thorough look-over.

What I wanted to write about in this post has nothing to do with signing leases or over-priced dumps, but more to do with what the business of renting/owning a house in affluent cities like Brisbane, does to the human psyche.

I am no cat lover, in fact you could say that I pretty much dislike pets of any kind, (at which point I feel I must apologise to all my pet-loving friends and relatives- it's just one of those traits that are hard to change, you know, like having a rotten temper or bad-joke-telling) that's not to say I don't like animals, just that I don't like keeping them. Anyway, today I felt a real affinity with two cats that I discovered in the rental house I was inspecting.

Poking my head around a corner to look into the dining room, my attention was drawn down to the floor where there sat a fat and shiny-coated grey cat, who was looking up at me with a withering and accusatory look which said "Who the fuck are you and what are you doing in my house?". I turned around and walked down the hall-way toward the bedrooms, where another, obviously more distressed cat bounded out of a room, into another, with the look of "Aaarrggghhhh, intruders, must hide, now, quickly".

You may think I am anthropomorphising the animals, but really, a cat's glare can be very unsettling, especially if one is already feeling sensitive about poking one's nose into other people's business, as I was, being in a stranger's home while they were out.

"But wait", I hear you say "you were with an agent and you had every right to be there, why would you feel like you were intruding?".
The point is, that the way agents conduct the business of renting/selling a house means that we become intruders, invading other people's privacy and just because the occupant may not be there, this does not make the intrusion o.k.

Certainly from a renters point of view,agents make us feel like we have no rights, that they can drag through anyone they like, in the interest of keeping the customers and the cash-flow coming. The same applies both for buying and selling a house. Agents take prospective buyers through like tour guides doing the local sightseeing tour, with an air of entitlement. For the half hour that they are showing a house, it is no longer someone's dwelling- it is a commodity to be tramped through with the sensitivity of boars in a vegie-patch.

Maybe I am projecting my own sensitivity about my private space being intruded by others, onto the general populace and few people actually find it an intrusion to have new tenants/owners come through their home. Maybe I put too much importance on the privacy of a living space. Maybe I am projecting the idea of intrusion onto those two stressed-looking cats.

On the other hand, maybe modern life is more concerned with cash-flow and sales, to allow such sensitive feelings like intrusion, to seep through to the psyche.

When I think about the Japanese idea of the inner sanctum of the home being inaccessible to those who do not share a close relationship with the occupants, this rests better with me.