Gentrification and the cruelties of the rental market kept forcing me to move. This Christmas, I know I’ll find happiness wherever I am

• In our end of year series, writers and public figures remember the place or time when they felt most at home

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.

Jay Bernard is a writer and artist