Living in London in 2023 is a series of struggles.
A struggle to find a coffee under £3.50.
A struggle to get to the office on trains that may or may not work. A struggle to go out for dinner and not have to pay with a kidney.
But far and away, the biggest, most quixotic, Odyssean quest is to find a place to live.
Unlike many of you, dear readers, I was not lucky enough to be born in the golden era of this country where you could buy a house in zone 1 for £9 and a handshake, paying about 40p a week towards the mortgage.
Sadly, I entered adult life and the property market in the wake of a global recession (the big one from The Big Short) and as a result, I commit a big chunk of my take-home pay to someone else’s mortgage (about £59,000 in the last five years).
chicken soup GettyImages-671803730 (1)
Chicken soup when you're poorly might be soothing compensation for those willing to move back home to their parents (Photo: Getty Images)
It’s not a particularly enjoyable experience but it’s a necessity for the life I want to live — namely one that’s fun and involves my friends.
So let me give you a little taste of what it’s like to find a flat in this city, in this economy.
Firstly, you check Rightmove more than any other app, then, when a flat is posted, even if you hate the location and the way it is decorated and the price and everything else, you still take time off work to go and look at it, with 30 other identikit young professional couples, with tote bags and Birkenstocks and irritating haircuts who work at agencies who may or may not be able to outbid you by several hundred pounds.
Is it any surprise that record numbers of young people are living with their parents later and later into life?
Among my generation — the young end of millennials and older Gen Zs there are now 600,000 more adult children living with their parents than there were ten years ago.
That is a lot of people, the population of a couple of London boroughs, who have now moved back home for the foreseeable future with no end in sight. And in my experience, no community is this more prevalent than the Jewish one.
The vast majority of my British Jewish friends, especially those on the beck-ier, northwest London end of the spectrum, are comfortably living at home, free from the clutches of the rental market and moronic estate agents.
What they lack in cultural experiences and nights out in town, they partially make up for with freshly cooked Friday night dinners, chicken soup when they’re sick and the warming matriarchal embrace of their kind Jewish mothers.
Living with my parents in the advanced end of my twenties is sadly not something I think I can stomach. The last time I moved flats, I had six weeks in between when I lived back home in Guildford. Six weeks may not sound like a long time, but every day that I was there brought me closer to an stress-induced aneurysm than years of living in London.
Now, my parents are lovely, warm supportive people. But God did not intend that many adults (five, with my sister and her boyfriend) to live under the same roof — it’s unnatural. I understand why so many of my peers are happy to go back home, save up and flee the nest only when they’re ready.
But for me, no matter how bad London gets, how many thousands of pounds leak out of my bank account monthly — I hope it’ll never get bad enough for me to move home.
At their best, Jewish parents are a warm embrace, a secure nest from which to launch. But at their worst, they are cloying, they are oversensitive, they are overprotective and they expect you to come home at a reasonable hour.
While the siren call of the suburbs may get me in the end, for now I’d rather struggle through London.
And hey, there are always Friday night dinners to go home for.
