I found a place to live, but there’s no heat

MY housing woes are over. Kind of. Since Christmas I have been crashing on beds, couches and floors. Now I have my own floor, but with strings. Due to my increasing desperation to find a home I could afford that didn’t involve living with eight other people in a matchbox in Zone 5, I had to look at some less conventional options, which is how I came across property guardianship. In theory, it’s a good idea — there’s a housing crisis in London, yet tons of premises lie uninhabited.

Property guardians move in to these and in exchange for the fly-by-the-seat-of-your-pants uncertainty about how long you can stay (you get 28 days’ notice if they want you out) guardians get a place to live at knockdown prices. There is also a strict no parties, no smoking policy which is JUST what I need. It could be a disused office, a room above a bingo hall, or in my case, a very habitable one-bed flat in need of a little TLC 20 minutes from work. The agent calls on a wet afternoon and I race to meet her.

She opens the door and I say “I’ll take it”. A week later I sign the papers and a few days after that I’m lugging all my boxes up four narrow flights of stairs with a Polish man called Alex. When Alex is gone, I look around, turn on all the taps, check for any signs of mice (none!) and start to unpack my belongings (eight boxes of books, bags of wrinkled clothes, unwashed bedding, and three mugs). I spend the day tinkering, trying to make it feel like home. I fiddle with the heating but the ‘Reset’ button keeps blinking at me. By 9pm, exhausted, I crawl into bed wearing two pairs of socks, thermals, my ski jacket and a woolly hat. Outside the window, I see the first flutter of snow begin to fall.