In 1950 my Australian grandmother bought a five-storey, Regency terraced house in what was then the no-man’s-land between Kentish Town and Highgate village. It was dilapidated, had no bathroom and cost slightly less than ￡1,000. She tarted it up enough to make it habitable, lived there for a while herself, before returning to Melbourne. For the next three decades it was mainly lived in by my dad, who in time filled it with a wife, three children, lodgers and itinerant Australians (including, at one point, a young, unemployed Barry Humphries).

In buying a house in Grove Terrace, my grandmother changed our lives. The place made us members of a slightly lefty, intellectual north London set, and gave us a deep aesthetic snobbery about the superiority of a square-paned window. Even though my parents sold the house in the mid-1980s, the magnolia tree my mother planted in the front garden is still there. Every time I drive past (it is all much smarter now and owned by the tenor Ian Bostridge) and see the tree, I think: that is where my roots are. That house used to be ours.

If I was born a fan of home ownership, the years since leaving Grove Terrace have made me an even bigger one. In 1983, I bought my first flat in Camden Town for ￡27,000. I sold it seven years later at a profit of almost 400 per cent, moved abroad and, returning a couple of years later with a husband and a child, bought a family house in Islington. This we did up and sold, bought another, which we also did up and sold, before finally coming to rest in a large, if undistinguished, house round the back of the Arsenal football stadium.