Being of that lucky percentage of Dublin's younger population which actually has somewhere to live, the chaotic state of the city's property market was, until recently, something to experience as an objective outsider. For me, as for many, the closest the market had come was the Sunday papers. Just how much will people spend? Just how far can things go before it all collapses in a confusion of crane bits and designer linoleum? Recently, however, the whole affair was pulled into sharper, more subjective focus. The one thing we had been clinging to, the one staple that would always be there - resistant to hurricanes, heatwaves and auctioneers' hammers - was pulled from our dependent grasp. Granny's house was put up for sale.
As is the fashion with grannies' houses, the place was loaded with history. Built in 1935, its first occupants were the Morgans. They lived there for 18 years - throughout the war and its wayward bombs, bringing up their young family with the help of a maid. There were bells in each room to call for her attention. By 1952 their needs had outgrown the place, however, and my grandparents moved in with their two girls, aged five and seven. In a time of economic optimism and comely crossroads the house on the corner site near Monkstown cost them a generous £3,500.
Old, sepia-tinted photographs show the sisters dressing up as ballerinas or nuns, parading around the ample garden in costume. The dog knew when Grandad came home that he would always have a biscuit in his pocket. The cat scaled the walls to lie at the foot of someone's sickbed. The huge doll's house seduced you in the greenhouse; there was a secret place in the hedge. Clearing out the place before the auction, we found the potted fingerprints of a generation. Through old school copybooks, shoeboxes stuffed with postcards, and archival tea chests we saw how the children scattered, marrying and doing their own thing. Grandad died of cancer in 1974. He had reached a good position in AIB, and left his widow in no poor state financially - but she always cursed being alone. Some kind of relief arrived, I'm sure, with the grandchildren. Granny used to tie sherbet sweets to the holly tree in anticipation of our arrival, insisting fairies left them there. The memories are clear and imagistic. Listening to the ships sound the new year off in Dun Laoghaire and Dublin Port, coming up to compete in the Young Scientists Exhibition in the RDS, chasing around ringing the old servant bells, pretending someone was at the door.
Of course, as you got older the place became an awful bore. Sure, you could have the craic with Granny, but there weren't exactly girls to snog or cigarettes to smoke, hidden behind her chair. And, to our perennial embarrassment, she never changed the photographs on her mantelpiece. It's all part of the process, we thought. Sooner or later, grannies stop buying new clothes - figuring they come back into fashion every six years or so anyway. But the place was burgled an unlucky number of times, her engagement ring was stolen, and as time went on she became more and more of a cosseted hermit.
Granny suffered a mild stroke in late 1996, and we quickly realised it wouldn't be realistic to expect her to look after herself. Initially, when someone falls ill, decisions are deferred - perhaps in the hope that the situation will reverse itself, or come good with time. Invariably, however, it doesn't. Her short stay in a nursing home metamorphosed into weeks, months, and years. The house remained unoccupied and seemed to suffer as a result. Lack of tenancy robbed it of some kind of life force, left caretaking open to professionals and hired hands; personality gradually flaked away.
After much deliberation, a decision was taken to offer it for sale by auction. Of course, people were upset - it is a big move to shrug off the place where you grew up, to clear out its furniture, putting in storage what you can't accommodate yourself. This is, after all, the piano you mucked all those chords up on, the couch you shouldn't climb over wearing your shoes, the ancient, sausage-sizzling record player. Everybody has different memories, some more rose-tinted than others - good and bad, a little hazy, a little clear. As we felt our way around the possibilities, the property market usurped the process with its figures and fashions. House prices went up by 30 per cent in the first quarter of this year alone, we read, and more than 50 new developments of various styles and sizes were set to take root in the greater Dublin area over the next six months. It seemed the currency of property was the Russian rouble, shooting up in front of our eyes like a taxi-meter on speed. But driving to Sherry Fitzgerald's offices in Dun Laoghaire, the price we might fetch seemed little more than a curiosity. We were preoccupied with the emotions, the milestones and the memories that would disappear under the hammer, the sheer physicality of the space that would change hands in such a short time.
And all of a sudden there we were, three generations, feeling in our own different ways like something out of Jane Austen, struggling hard to let the old shell go. Of course, it was well out of our hands by this stage. The handler had been floating around like a pilot fish for three weeks, guiding visitors through the nooks and crannies. The auctioneer teased the market with "an imposing, detached home". It offered, he said, "the generosity of accommodation and character only to be found in older houses" and was within a stone's throw of Monkstown village. The descriptions in the brochure seemed so clinical, with entries such as "Bedroom 4, 8 feet 6 inches x 9 feet", instead of "room at end of landing where Mr Bear hides at night - brush teeth quickly". It needed new windows and central heating installed, but there was planning permission for a second residence on the site. Three bidders picked up at slightly below the guide price. They quickly dropped to two, and within minutes the cacophony of memories, mice and meaning was sold. The buyer, to our initial dismay, was a developer. I say to our dismay because he outbid a young couple pregnant with their first child, and you'd have to be a bit odd not to have wished for them to make a fresh start in the old thing. The most will be made of the planning permission - most likely adding a second house either in the back garden or alongside, utilising the corner site to the full. The buyer is, we are told, sensitive and well intentioned. And besides, the money is good, the auctioneers advise. Take it and run.
After the melee we all went with the solicitor for afternoon tea and a sherry at the Marine Hotel in Dun Laoghaire. She recommended celebrating the rite of passage, having recently witnessed the sale of her own family home. Share a parting glass and move on. But the younger amongst us are preoccupied with the fact that, if things keep going the way they are, most will never own a property in the city. It's funny how the staples in your life peel away, one by one, pushing forth in an unsettling rapport with change.
And so it's sold - in a sea of figures and investment potential, something we held so solid in our lives, something that seemed almost eternal. Some of us are in shreds, some philosophical, some grumpy. Everyone is wistful. Behind the cash and the chaos, boatloads of history and decades of growing up are dissolved. I'm reminded of a line in Wim Wenders's 1997 film, The End of Violence, musing on just how temporary even the most concrete of things reveal themselves to be at the end of the day. "Just when you think you've finally got it figured, in a heartbeat it changes again."