After a while, you want to live alone. And then it happens and you discover everything that’s difficult about it. You realise that you didn’t really want to live alone, you were just sad and alienated in your old life.

The pandemic reshuffled society in a way that could not be anticipated. Sometimes it feels as though the life I now have has come about because I stepped through a portal to a parallel world. There is a disconcerting jump cut between life before Covid-19 and life now. In the history of unstable housing that characterised my 20s and early 30s, and about which I feel nothing but regret, there was a moment when it changed from an unquestioned, if depressing reality, to something emblematic.

Lots of people discovered that their friends harboured secrets or tendencies that were intensified by such a pressurised situation. One of the most galling realisations was about the class difference – suddenly, people had inheritances they wanted to protect, or received deposits that allowed them to move out of their tumbledown........

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