When I was growing up, half a century ago, one of the bedrock expectations of our parents’ generation was that each of us – I was the middle son of three – would fly the parental nest before we were out of our teens and, after an indeterminate period in communal “digs”, reach for the gold star of home ownership.
So dominant was the totem of home ownership when I was young that a certain stigma attached to anyone who reached their late 20s, as I did, without hankering for what even Virginia Woolf never romanticised – multiple rooms of one’s own.
