Coronavirus has driven me to fantasise even more about moving home

My partner and I have a habit of looking at other properties online – this has become even more rampant during the pandemic but it seems we’re not the only ones considering a new home, writes Holly Baxter

There’s been a countryside exodus with the rise of remote working (Getty Images/iStockphoto)

My fiance and I have a habit of scrolling through property listings on sites like apartments.com, RightMove and Zillow, just to make sure we constantly feel on-edge about all our housing-related decisions. We especially like to do it when we’re bang in the middle of a year-long lease, so we can torture ourselves with what might have been while knowing that there’s absolutely no logistical way we can take advantage of what’s on the screen before us.

So entrenched has this habit become throughout our relationship that we’ve got our own phrase for it: “looking at house porn”. And so regularly do we deploy that phrase that E once turned to me in a crowded subway carriage in Manhattan last year and said, in what can only be described as his ‘outside voice’, “What did you think of that porn I sent you earlier?” No wonder Republicans think that the liberal media elites in New York City are contributing to the moral decline of the nation.

Those above us in the food chain have been fleeing the city altogether for nice houses with back yards and home offices