Author: Liz Dawes
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This week Liz Dawes reveals her secret internet addiction…

I’m away for the weekend with the kids (it being half term) and we’re back in my home town by the sea.  After a long day kicking through waves and running along beaches, the kids are tucked up in bed, giggling contentedly.  As they succumb to the deep sleep that always follows fresh air and exercise, I’m downstairs in front of a roaring fire, a glass of red in hand.  Bliss.

I love these moments of solitude.  In the quiet of a cosy cottage on the beach, I have the privacy to relax, get a little tipsy, and indulge my secret vice.

House porn.

Oh don’t make that face.  You’ve all done it.

For the uninitiated, this involves nosing around the websites of grubby estate agents and finding out where you could afford to live – if only you would throw caution to the wind, sell up, and move.

My usual MO is to fall in love with wherever I’m staying and immediately conclude that I should live there; not hard in this case, since I love this little seaside town.  I trawl through the internet, wide-eyed and over-excited, like a teenager who’s worked out the password for all the parental guidance locks.

If you’re a Londoner as I am, the absurd price of property here means that if you’re prepared to leave our smoky old capital, you could live almost anywhere. My past dirty- secret-discoveries have been a windmill (so Jonathan Creek), a houseboat (quaint, though interior-designed to within an inch of its shabby chic life) and an eco-pod (just call me swampy); although I would have had to relocate to Gloucestershire, Norfolk and Dorset respectively.

This weekend, I’m agog at homes by the sea, with their weather boarding and open fires.  I drool over mansions that I can suddenly afford, exclaiming that the same money wouldn’t get me a bus stop back home.  I perv over the implausibly huge outside spaces, the beach huts, the barbecue pits.  I groan over the pseudo-Scandinavian blue and white striped décor and whimper at spare bedrooms and off street parking.  I tremble over sea views and sigh contentedly at balconies in the sun.

If I sell up, I could buy ones of these quaint homes, get rid of the mortgage, and waft about the coastline – a bohemian, self-indulgent writer, raising scruffy feral children who have rediscovered nature.

Alas, Londoners find it almost impossible to relocate.  We cling to whatever rabbit hutch we can afford, convinced (possibly rightly so) that if we leave, and it turns out to be a mistake, we will never get onto the London property market again.  We watch as brave souls make the huge leap to…elsewhere. We visit. We sigh over the space and relaxation they’ve bought themselves; and then we hurry back to town, fearful that in the time we’ve been away, we’ve become hopelessly out of touch.  Then in the dead of night, we sneak onto our laptops, and snoop into bedrooms and gardens, gasping at prices and sighing at décor, and secretly wondering if we’re brave enough to follow suit.

And then we crawl back under our duvet, hoping no one ever finds out how feckless and unfaithful we really are…