On the mornings I don’t feel anxious when I wake up, I look out of the window and admire the sycamore at the back of my garden and thank my lucky stars that I have a place of my own and a bloody big tree to love. It is luck that has brought me here. Unbelievable luck that the landlord sold up cheaply and offered the place to us. Luck that after being on benefits for most of my adulthood I was able to have work coming in and could get a mortgage. Luck that my love’s distant uncle died and left us a couple of grand when that’s what a deposit on a place cost. Luck that I am old enough to remember when housing didn’t eat up so much money.
I live in a row of old buildings that are gradually being bought up by slumlords, something you don’t hear much about within the regeneration rhetoric continuously flaunted around here. Yesterday I amused myself by reading Tripadvisor reviews by unsuspecting tourists staying at the flophouse next door. My ceiling leaks because the upstairs landlord doesn’t like to spend money on plumbers even though he’s probably clearing at least two thousand a month from the property. He’s got his eye on my place too. I don’t live anywhere fancy but having a cheap and secure home means that it is easier for me to make choices about my life around money and work, howI feel about the future, my sense of being safe.