We were also moving from the busy clamour of London, where I’d lived for the previous 17 years, to the rolling greens and yellows of the Welsh countryside. We were part of the exodus of 93,300 people leaving the city last year to seek cheaper housing, as a report by estate agent Savills revealed last week. This was an 80% rise on net outward migration from 2012; London rents had also soared by a third over the past decade.

This could have been just another piece of investigative journalism, citing the many ways in which the housing system here in the UK fails, but in fact Kieran Yates gives us a fascinating insight into her own personal experience of the system that let her, and her family down on numerous occasions.And the sad reality is that experiences like hers (and mine and quite probably yours) are becoming increasingly normalised. This is because “we don’t have good long-term solutions to think about how we live today,” says Yates. Two weeks after my visit, less than two miles away from this flat, Grenfell Tower was destroyed, catastrophically, and 168 households were left homeless. The idea of a building I’d once lived in being so close to the disaster but being left empty felt reprehensible. Kieran Yates: London has a large population plus a huge disparity of wealth and access to open space, so I can see how it is easily used as a framework to think about these things. But this is a conversation that is national – even global. I’m somebody who understands that because I’ve lived in lots of different places around the UK outside of the cities. There’s no way that you can talk about gentrification in our cities – whether that’s Manchester or Birmingham or London – without talking about rural gentrification too, and thinking about the impact of second homes or Airbnbs on smaller local economies. Rent strikes are controversial but guess what, people win,” she says. “And bailiff resistance is controversial, but guess what, people win. And confronting an estate agent or a racist landlord is very precarious work, but guess what, people win.” It’s important not to be blind to the “community and looking after each other that we have had to do because the government has not done it for us”, she explains.

And then there are the floors she has slept on in between, pointing to the impact continually moving home has on our ability to take care of ourselves in the present. As a serial renter, I had to endure months of housemate auditions, sitting in strangers’ kitchens and expected to perform an optimised version of myself. Sometimes there were group interviews, all of us shuffling in together like a Lord of the Flies-style social experiment, where the most brazen among us made loud jokes. Some candidates had the genius sales gene and discussed things that were mainstream enough to elicit positive reaction: usually The Wire.

Maybe, maybe not. But Yates has me well beaten. By the age of 25, she’d lived in 20 different houses across the country. There’s the childhood flat in a car showroom that had floor-to-ceiling windows. Then there are housemate auditions in her 20s that enable tenants to discriminate on the basis of race, class, sexuality – reproducing some of the systemic disparities of our society. I loved hearing about Yates' life, I especially loved hearing about her mum. Although, I know this was not the point of this book, I would have loved to hear more about her mum and the relationship they created. We definitely got a feel for their relationship but I would've liked to know how creating a home differs when you are a mother, the pressure to create a home for others even when you do not want too. Maybe a potential idea for a sequel? By the age of twenty-five journalist Kieran Yates had lived in twenty different houses across the country, from council estates in London to car showrooms in rural Wales. Yates writes with clarity, warmth and passion and leaves the reader wanting to march on Whitehall immediately'