Room available at my inn this Christmas

If you live your life resisting the pull of a steady job — because you value time more than money— you’ll be adept at fiscal ad libbing, writes Suzanne Harrington.

Freelancing, bartering, thinking on your feet, making the very most of what you have — in my case, a spare room. Writing for a living is glorious, but unless you’re JK Rowling, it often means too much month at the end of your money — hence the necessity of installing cash machines in the spare room. Human cash machines.

The last lodger stayed five years, so like coming out of a longterm relationship and finding the dating scene disorientatingly swipe-appy, it seems the luring of lodgers is no longer straightforward.

It used to be a brief online ad — where, what, how much. Now, it’s all about creating a profile about your sexual and dietary preferences and your cat’s star sign, accompanied by carefully curated videos and photos. TripAdvisoring your own bathroom, Instagramming the fridge.

A more honest ad would read, ‘Please come and live in my house, for the love of god; it’s nearly Christmas and I need your money’. But that would be a bit needy and desperate. Which, by mid December, I totally am.

The ghosting is worse than Tinder. A steady stream of strangers sit at the kitchen table and tell me their expectations about what they want from a spare room, while I tell them they can’t smoke out the window and must like dogs and teenagers — think Friends meets Shallow Grave — but then they leave and I never hear from them again. Have they died on the way to the bus stop? Fallen into a black hole?

I lower my standards. Yes, I tell the binge drinker with the enormous dog, ‘Of course you can move in’. We set a date, I take the ad down, and exhale. One hour before they are due to move in, they cancel.

Christmas is bearing down like a runaway truck. I ask the teenagers how they’d feel about the yucca plant being our Christmas tree this year; they look unimpressed, so I desist from lecturing about the mindless consumption of disposable crap, and repost my ad. Oh come all ye faithful. Seriously. Come. Come now.

A giant Eastern European expresses robust interest, as does an unhinged Brazilian, a stoner Spaniard who forgot to show up, and several non-committal natives; post viewing, all subsequently fall into the black hole between my house and the bus stop.

The etiquette seems to be that there is no etiquette; people come, enthuse, ask all the right questions, then disappear without trace. The yucca will look perfectly fine draped in fairy lights, and Visa and Aldi can do Christmas this year.

Until — a baby Jesus miracle — someone texts; they need a room urgently. Immediately. They come, they view, they do a bank transfer. Twenty minutes later in the posh supermarket, I am loading a trolley with Heston Blumenthal goodies and bigass tree. Happy Christmas, world.