I feel I missed out a key detail when talking about my fortune and part time work on Saturday. Unlike 90% of my peers I own my own home. For the past twelve-and-a-half years I’ve been paying off a 25-year mortgage, with great help from my parents and deceased ancestors. It’s more achievable when you live in a middle-of nowhere council estate, but I still feel vulgar to have more security and capital than st people I meet.

I have a housemate, who is technically a lodger, which makes me a live-in landlord, someone already fortunate and wealthy who has someone else to pay my bills. For years, lodgers have been paying my mortgage, and gaining nothing in the long-term. That’s the difference between renting and buying. If you buy, you get to keep it. If you rent, the landlord keeps it, and makes enough from you to buy another house, and another. None for you, dear listener.

I have the good fortune to come from comfort, while so many are tipping beyond the border of poverty. This has given me trouble sometimes, but I’m not going to ask for your sympathy when I’m the fortunate one. I often think that life isn’t fair, and I’m lucky it is. If life was fair, why would we have been born at all, let alone in this fortunate century. Sure, the 21st Century has its problems, but we also have access to all of history’s literature and ingredients, we can enjoy Doctor Who, moderately free elections, and Stevie Wonder. We get to live here.

Landlords are fortunate and almost by definition gain capital rom others’ poverty, rather than from work of any kind.

The best landlord I’ve really heard of was named Christine Crapper. She won Miss Great Britain in 1971, and was a glamorous co-host on Sale of the Century. She also won Miss Yorkshire Television, and in 1978 an award named Miss She, which is the most gendery title I ever heard. She was my housemate’s most recent landlord and seems to have treated her tenants with patience, understanding and humanity. She died last year, after a life of glamour, family and campaigning for cancer charities. It takes a powerful woman to bear a name like Christine Crapper, and from the several accounts I’ve heard of her, she is well missed, and her memory is a blessing.

I endeavour not to be a cruel and crooked live-in Landlord, and do all I can to make this home egalitarian. Nonetheless, I am deeply fortunate in ways that, if I wasn’t, would make life a heavier thing.