vanman yachting by Simon Aulman

The photo is the house I lived in back between the ages of about 4 and 12. I have to keep on using these old slide transfer things because I don't have a camera and it's been a year since I last used my mobile phone and I've forgotten how it works - how to take pics. I only got my phone because I was homeless and I needed to keep up with emails and shit.

I don't drop that in to get sympathy or anything - I was just playing at homelessness - I loved it - homeless for the whole of the winter of 2016/17. I still had my tiny little Vauxhall Combo van and I slept in the back of it. It would've been a great opportunity to drive to India or something conventional, but I just loathe the idea of being a tourist and helping to turn the world into one big mall - all to give me something to talk about at a dinner party.

When it's my turn to say something interesting about where I've been and what I've done I like the fact that I have nothing to say. Now that I socialise a bit more regularly I've discovered that this is no handicap. Ages ago I noticed that in any group of slightly unrelaxed friends there are just four topics of conversation - their family, their work, their hobbies, and their holidays. I'm stymied. My family are mad and embarrassing, I have no job, I have no hobbies, I never go on holiday.
Of these four topics, I find other people's holidays the most boring. I think they do too.

But that doesn't stop them from sometimes getting quite cross with me for my never travelling and the fact that here in my 50s I still have never been abroad. It's not "abroad" that I fear, it's having to talk about it afterwards.

I'd have to talk about a man I saw pulling fish up through a hole in the ice or a woman playing some wooden instrument that looked like a giant grasshopper, I'd have to wear the same slogans on my t-shirt as my neighbour, huff at Trump and puff at Brexit, talk about my paralysed mother, invent a hobby, probably something pathetically easy like photography, and pretend I am looking for a job despite having walked out of every job I've ever done and being completely unemployable - all laudable achievements and I shall surely regret on my deathbed not having done any of them properly or at all.

But really all I ever want to talk about is mooching about being homeless and coming almost alive - there is nothing to fear - I yearn for the crash - you should too - when the landlords will turf us all out and we will all have to do it and conversations with friends will be a bit less tedious.