Six months ago, Jen was weeping into her pillow—our pillow, really—after a bad day during her internship at the Independent.

‘The cheapest mattress I was allowed to include in the round-up was nine hundred pounds, Im. And it hit me—if I carry on like this, I will never, ever have nine hundred pounds to spend at once, on anything.’

I felt a familiar, gnawing tightness in my shoulders, in my chest. My constant money anxiety. ‘Does anyone, really? And mattresses last for ages, at least ten years. So that’s ninety pounds a year, or…’ I try, and fail, to do some fast maths, ‘less than two pounds a week. I’m sure people are all buying their mattresses on credit cards, it’s all going in the big black hole. Well, I guess it would be a red hole…’

‘No, Imogen, listen,’ said Jen, through tears. ‘I think most people don’t live like us. I don’t think it’s normal to not have nine hundred pounds saved up somewhere for a mattress, or a holiday, or…Leanne from school has bought a house.’

‘We hate Leanne. We’re not friends with her.’

‘That’s not the point. Leanne, who grew up in the same shitty town as us, with absolutely nothing going for her, is now a recruitment consultant with two children and a three bed semi. She’s building a life. Maybe it’s not a life we’d want to live, but…Mum was telling me that if I came back and trained to be a teacher, I’d probably be eligible for a key worker mortgage. I might be able to buy somewhere to live in a few years.’

‘In Devon, though? You’d give this up for that?’ I was crying too, now.

Jen looked away. ‘Yeah. “This” isn’t…it’s not really working, is it?’

‘Maybe we’re still paying our dues.’

‘No. We’re broke, we’re burned out, I’m not even getting interviews any more. I just tried for a staff writer job for Mortgage magazine, they wanted someone with “extensive experience” and the annual salary was about the same as I’d get if I went home and worked as a teaching assistant. I applied anyway, and got an email back saying sorry, no thank you, they had been “inundated with applications”. Inundated. Overwhelmed by the number of people who want to write about mortgages all day long, for hardly any money. Mum says that they’re so desperate for teachers at the moment that I’d get a bursary to train—and probably walk into a job as soon as I’d qualified.’