It’s a small house, even smaller inside than it looked from the outside. I’m standing on a threadbare doormat that’s still got the dried remnants of mud from someone else’s boots on it. There’s a wooden staircase in front of me, to the left is what looks like the kitchen, and to the right is a living room. I can see the outline of an upside-down sofa covered with dust sheets. I hold the banister of the staircase, my fingers leaving lines in layers of undisturbed dust as I walk up slowly, using my phone to light the way. Upstairs, circled around a narrow landing walkway, I find a storage room, a tiny bathroom, and a bedroom with a single bed on its side and the wardrobe knocked over with one door hanging off. Telltale stones lie among the broken glass reflecting from the floor, evidence of what happened to the empty window frames. No one’s even bothered to board over the upstairs ones.

Half the landing and the storage room have brown stains of water running down the walls, a freezing wind is howling around my neck, and there’s the constant flapping of tarpaulin sheets where someone’s tried to repair the roof and the repair has fallen in too.

In the bathroom, there’s still toilet roll unravelling from a rusty holder and when I try to flush the discoloured water in the loo, nothing happens. Great. No electricity and no water. The estate agent had plenty of warning that I was coming today, shouldn’t they have got everything turned back on? I glance in the cracked mirror on the wall. Maybe they didn’t think anyone would be stupid enough to live in it. It’s not exactly inhabitable by any stretch of the imagination.