Nine Addresses in Four Years

A friend asked me recently for my address, for a wedding invitation, and I had to stop and think about which one. Not because I have more than one. Because I have had so many in the last four years that the most recent one had not yet replaced the others in my head. I gave her the right one in the end. Then I went home and wrote down all of them, in order, to see what they looked like on a page.

There are nine. Here they are, with what I remember of each.

One. A room behind the bus station, fourth floor, no lift. I arrived in September with two bags. The room had a bed, a wardrobe with one door and a window that looked onto the backs of other windows. I could hear the buses reversing all night, a beeping that I still hear sometimes in quiet rooms. I stayed four months, until the landlord's son needed it.

Two. A shared flat near the market, six tenants, one bathroom. A rota on the fridge that nobody followed. A Brazilian violinist who practised scales at seven in the morning and apologised every evening. I learned to cook lentils properly in that kitchen, from a woman from Valladolid who was training to be a nurse. Five months.

Three. A sublet from a lecturer on sabbatical. Books floor to ceiling, a cat I was paid to feed, and a view of a church tower. This was the only place I have lived that felt like a set for someone else's life, and I was very happy there, in the way you are happy in a hotel. Seven months, then she came home.

Four. A basement studio with a window at pavement level. I saw feet all day. Shoes, dogs, pushchair wheels, the hem of a nun's habit every morning at a quarter to eight. It flooded twice. I kept my notebooks on top of the wardrobe. Three months, and I left before the lease was up, which cost me my deposit.

Five. Back to a shared flat, different part of town. Four tenants this time, all working nights except me. The flat was silent all day and loud all night, which suited my deadlines. There was a balcony with a lemon tree in a bucket that none of us had planted and all of us watered. Eight months.

Six. A room in a family house in the suburbs. The family rented out their eldest son's room while he was working abroad. His posters were still on the walls and his football trophies were still on the shelf. I ate dinner with them on Sundays. When he came home for Christmas I slept on the sofa for ten days, and in January they asked, very kindly, whether I might find somewhere else by spring.

Seven. Three weeks on a friend's floor. I am counting this one because I had post delivered there.

Eight. A one-bedroom flat of my own, near the river. The first place I rented alone, with my name on the lease and nobody else's. I painted the kitchen. I bought a sofa. After ten months the building was sold to an investment company and every tenant received the same letter on the same day.

Nine. Where I am now. A small flat on the third floor of a building with a courtyard and a caretaker who sings. I have been here for seven months. I have not painted anything yet.

Writing it all down, I expected to feel sorry for myself, and for a moment I did. Nine addresses in four years is not a life anyone plans. But when I looked at the list for longer, something else came through. In each of those places I learned something that I still use. How to cook lentils. How to sleep through reversing buses. How to live with a stranger's cat and a stranger's son's trophies. How to keep notebooks dry. How to tell when a landlord is about to sell.

I also noticed which things survived every move. A small wooden box that belonged to my mother. A frying pan. A shoebox of notebooks, one for each year, which has now been carried up and down more staircases than I can count. A plant, a cutting from the lemon tree on the balcony at address number five, which has lived in four different windows and is still alive, somehow, though it has never produced a lemon.

That, I suppose, is my home at the moment: a box, a pan, a shoebox and a plant. It fits in the back of a small car. It is not very much. But it has been everywhere I have been, and it knows the way.