– Edinburgh, Scotland: Student halls and private flats with rats.

– Zapallal, outskirts of Lima, Peru: I was 19 and hoping to make a small difference to the lives of orphans but they were better at teaching me about happiness than vice versa.

– Oaxaca, Mexico: 20 years old with a different group of volunteers. Street children who you’d think had little to smile about put the biggest smiles on our faces.

– Vienna, Austria: Near some dodgy bars and a police station. I got locked out twice. The first time I had to pay almost a month’s rent to a locksmith and cried when he left; the second, a musician coming home from a gig let me sleep on his and his girlfriend’s living room floor until my flatmates were back from their respective nights out.

– Salamanca, Spain: My Spanish flatmates introduced me to tortillas and the Spanish culture of not going out until most English people would be coming home. (Apparently, the “lateness” of Spanish culture stems from when Franco moved Spain’s clocks ahead one hour in order to be on the same time as Germany in the Second World War. The poor Spaniards should be on Greenwich Mean Time, not Central European Time!)

– Kufstein, Austria: The fairytale “Pearl of Tyrol” where I tried to wear a dirndl as often as possible and feared getting told off for not separating my rubbish correctly.

– Barcelona, Spain: The bathroom had a shower directly over the toilet so everything inside the room got soaked, including the toilet roll if you forgot to move it. But the apartment was near a park where people danced salsa on Sunday afternoons which put a big smile on my face.

– Liverpool, England: A brief sojourn while teaching at the university but it was long enough to notice how much Liverpudlians like to have a good time and how the local girls love wearing orange face powder.

– Reggio Calabria, Italy. The mafioso southern Italian city where my bike got stolen twice in three years and I’d sometimes see burnt-out cars on the way to work. But the local fruit and veg shop always gave me huge bags of fresh basil for free, I frequently ate reasonably-priced six-course meals, and my landlord insisted I accept a bottle of red wine whenever I paid the rent (which had to be in cash).

– Bintulu, the island of Borneo: Due to a lack of small apartments, I had to rent a three-bedroom semi-detached house which I shared mainly with geckos and thousands of ants until Matt moved in. The house was on a housing estate but one morning I walked out to find a chicken on the roof of my car. It was of marginal significance given the cobra that had taken up semi-permanent residence in one of the schools I worked in.

– Nilai, Malaysia. Matt was reluctant to live on the 19th floor of a building called “Sky Bungalow” because he said it looked too much like a hotel. He quickly settled in though, lamenting the lack of a pool and gym in any place we’ve lived since.

– Nice, France (current hangout). The French Riviera. The Dream. But we never eat out because it’s too expensive and the sun doesn’t get round to our side of the building until late afternoon so between October and April I have to do star jumps regularly throughout my writing days to keep warm. Then again, I feel the cold about ten times more than the average person.

– York, England. My mum’s house, on and off, over a period of about 20 years (so far). Her creaking attic floors bear the weight of anything I can’t fit in a suitcase, which is unfortunately quite a lot. I should have a clear-out but have the habit of convincing myself I may one day have a use for my 1980s cassettes, 1990s CDs, or dresses I wore when I was twenty.