Off the grid in Melbourne Diaries

Settlement was due to take place today for my new house. However, I got a call this morning from my conveyancing lawyer telling me that the vendor’s solicitor had screwed up the banking details (having had 90 days to sort this out), so all I have is a licence agreement until the idiots can work it out. This sort of professional incompetence is common within the Australian property market, which in Melbourne (as in Sydney and some other Australian cities) is the subject of a crazy bubble economy that benefits baby boomer investors, overseas investors, and nobody else. With houses being sold to people who won’t occupy them, or are bequeathing them to children at some distant point in the future, some conveyancers simply just don’t give a shit. The housing market in Australia is demonstrably unfair, and is going to create a generation of people dependent on their parents until the age of 50. Not being rich and determined to live independently, with everything in my name only, it’s been a struggle for me to get the funds together - I calculated this morning that if I hadn’t bought my place this year then I would, at 38, probably have been renting for a further ten years, the property market outpacing any increases to my salary.

However, after driving from Brighton to Williamstown, and from there to Eltham and then back to Brighton (a horrific drive in heavy traffic), I got all the documents finalised and even got a gift basket from the real estate agent (a nice thought, though they probably do this for all new homeowners). The temporary downside is an absence of basic amenities for the next few days, including a fridge. My slight weight loss, the product I think of my new vegetarian diet, is going to suffer from one take-away after another. Still, my new house looks nicer than the old house despite being bought at amount less than what my old house would go for. I spoke with the real estate agent and they confirmed what I suspected (a previous entry deals with this) - that I had effectively scammed a $20,000 to $60,000 bargain at the auction by knowing the auction process better than the 60-something people I was bidding against. Feeling very smug and clever about that.

On non-house news, I finally deactivated my Facebook account this morning, which I hadn’t actively used in two to three years. This is the final step in effectively closing any public face that I may have online. This site will be the only one I update and will remain pseudonymous - one person here would know my name but she hasn’t updated in ages and I don’t think she reads posts anymore (a sure sign that she’s in a happier place than she was updating regularly). In part, this is a reaction to work, which I have to be a bit secretive about, and which has educated me on how accessible personal information is online. But, more generally, it is also a product of my own reclusive and self-reliant nature - I simply don’t want people at work to know what I’m up to. Another aspect is self-hate over the way, out of boredom, I would voyeuristically ‘check people up’ online who I wouldn’t have the slightest intention of talking to offline (no doubt appearing as a creepy entry in their ‘People Who May Know You’ column), as if this were some wishful online dating on my part, the equivalent of making some Sims character look like your secret high school crush. this morning I had the thought - “Why am I doing this? What benefit is there in knowing what x is doing with their lives?” I know almost everyone does this to some extent, but the older one gets the creepier this becomes, so I have shut myself off from it.

On a side note, moving house has meant packing up 700 DVDs and the same number of CDs. And this is probably where they’ll stay - packed up in plastic boxes. There’s not enough space and putting them on display would make me seem like a 90s technophobe anyway. I really love the strange films and music I’ve accumulated over the years - the crusty out of print blues and psychedelic albums, the cult films (the Nazi Germany version of Titanic; East German westerns (‘Easterns’); God knows how many film noirs; the freaky 40s horror film box sets; the scary Peter Watkins documentaries) - I am stupidly proud of this financially worthless output. It’s a shame that owning music and movies in a physical form has become such an anachronism.

Last updated August 20, 2015