We find solace in the strangest of places and habits. These past months I am obsessively invested in home shows. In particular Grand Designs; the English or the Australian versions, it doesn’t matter. 

And it doesn’t require Freudian levels of insight to realize why. The form of the show is an arc of predictable storytelling in approximately 50 minutes that I find stupidly comforting in this age of personal and political anxiety. 

Someone wants to build a home. It starts with a discussion about budget, the plot of land and the plans. And by the end, all obstacles have been navigated, roofing has been nailed to beams, windows have been a-fixed to frames, and finishings have been chosen. And the last 8 minutes or so are artful tracking shots of the finished result. That many of these homes are not to my taste or style is completely beside the point. 

People have set out to build a shelter for themselves and they have achieved said goal. They’ve navigated what must be the hell of contractors and inflated budgets and blown out timelines but that’s played almost off camera. There’s enough of that angst to tease the viewer but the objective is a happy ending. That’s pretty much its premise. 

So it was particularly strange and shocking when my sister told me that our family home had burned to the ground. None of us had lived there for over two decades but this was a home built specifically for us. My grandfather and my uncle designed and built it for a growing family on over an acre of land at the foot of the Great Dividing Range. For the first 18 years of my life I swung Tarzan-like from many of its old-growth trees with my siblings, played spotlight in its overrun and unruly gardens, mowed its lawns accompanied with lashings of moaning, played tennis on the court that was nonchalantly placed over an historic grave (a tale of another time), rolled about on Mum’s tiger skin rug that she claimed she’d killed in India (definitely a tale for another time), pounded up and down the circular staircase too many times to count, marveled at Mum’s profusion of roses and cosmos and poppies that she grew along the stretch of driveway before the roundabout. 

The memories increase as I list them.  

Monique heard about what happened to the house a few weeks ago. Even before this bit of news, the house had been in a sad decline of some years. Most of the trees had been torn down, Mum's roses, her rhododendrons, the large boulders she'd shipped in from god-knows-where were long gone. On my last visit some years ago, the absence of two turpentines in the circular area of the drive highlighted the house's sad fate. The land had been subdivided, and the house itself no longer reverberated with the sound of Dad's Beethoven or our belligerent piano playing or the happy shouts of a raucous and wonderfully barbaric pastime of serving aces into the chickens on the tennis court. Our home was long a shell of its former glory. I could easily come across all Daphne du Maurier and Rebecca if I go on too long: 

Last night I dreamt I went to Manderley again. 

Monique was told that there were rumors that the fire was an inside job but either way, that’s no interest for me. 

If there’s one thing I’ve learned about grief it's that, like trauma, it can lay in wait for an age. It will bide its time as the days, the weeks, the years slip away while its existential pain lies tucked away,  its howl waiting to shout out when you least expect it. 

Mum and Dad moved out of Summerhill and into the house on Cliff Road in my 30s. It was after the horror of John’s car accident. He recuperated at Summerhill for about a year before he and I moved up to Sydney. Speaking for myself, we packed up the home with barely a look back. My theory is we were ostensibly done and dusted with its memories and its lifestyle. All things come to an end and when we moved away, the timing was exactly as it should be. 

It’s only now, when Cliff Road is the last dwelling that remains as tangible evidence of our collective childhood, that a sorrow has arrived like a weird rain cloud. To spell it out: my grandparents are dead, my aunt and uncle are also dead, my parents are on a pernicious, cruel decline to their own deaths, the house in Bellambi that was the home of my mother, aunt and uncle is long gone; this was the house that Opa built entirely in Holland, down to the door handles before being packed up and shipped to Australia. And now Summerhill is a shell, Oma and Opa’s apartment was sold earlier this year and at some point, Cliff Road will be sold too. 

I don't know if it helps to categorize the changes that have hit us in rather quick succession in the past few years. But this accumulation of crap news feels like aeroplanes banking up for landing. 

Not sure even Kevin McCloud has the fix for this.