As England slumps home under the weight of salt-encrusted beach towels, empty crisp packets and leaking shampoo bottles, ready to return to work and a winter of crippling energy costs after the summer holidays, the question of home comforts is forefront in our minds.

Luckily, the tear-and-share experts at the kitchen roll brand Plenty are ready to step in with a handy list of what makes your house feel like a home, gathered from surveying 1,500 adults. Ah, surveys – the last refuge of columnists, marketing managers and anyone tasked with writing their local’s pub quiz.

In this instance, I imagine a person with a clipboard and a stack of paper towels hanging out of their fleece pocket, following some harried parent as they root through their kitchen drawers looking for the spare back door key, while asking “what about this half-dead spider plant and tub of peanut butter? Does that make your house feel like a home?”.

And yet, the results seem rather more aimed towards an aspiring Instagram estate agent than anyone I’ve ever shared a sink with. Fifty-one per cent of those surveyed mentioned clean sheets, 45 per cent said a well stocked fridge, 32 per cent said, in a rather Elton John move, fresh flowers, while for 25 per cent it was a cake baking in the oven. Who are these Stepford Spouses coming home to a showroom of freshly laundered linen and warm Victoria sponges?

In my house – and I would guess most homes in the UK – walking through your front door is to enter a giant, unconsenting game of The Floor is Lava, only the islands you jump from are patches of flooring between dumped bags, abandoned shoes, piles of books that teeter like a particularly advanced game of Jenga, unwashed mugs, some abandoned clip-together children’s toy creation (is it a jellyfish? Is it a castle? Is it a 30cm high rendition of Birmingham New Street station? You’d better start asking some tactical questions now because guess wrong and your child is likely to whine like a two-stroke engine). While I can see what the 29 per cent who said comfy throws were aiming at, surely the truth is that in most homes anything thrown is a throw – coats, blankets, tea towels, large pets.

This time last year I was sleeping in my father’s kitchen, while our son bedded down on a rolled up camping mat beside a multi-plug and collection of dirty work clothes. We’d had to move out of our old rented place and there was absolutely no sign of when we might get the keys to our first family home. And so, like umbrellas, gloves and cheap novels, we started to drift between different people’s flats and houses, never quite belonging anywhere and relying on the hospitality and care of others.

During that time, I developed a rather sharper sense of what constituted a home comfort, as I longed for a stable place to hang my son’s raincoat. We are enormously privileged, of course; we were eventually able to move and now pay a mortgage. But today, as I look across the chaos of my house, I can tell you specifically what makes a place feel like home. And it doesn’t involve the sound of a lawnmower in the distance (19 per cent) or scented candles (30 per cent).

A drawer full of tupperware that doesn’t quite close unless you kick it; a fruit bowl containing one apple, a stapler, some post-its, two rubber bands and a set of keys; a lamp that takes such a specific type of lightbulb that it hasn’t been used for three months when the last one blew; Wi-Fi; piles of greetings cards that aren’t quite nice enough to frame but you’re too sentimental to just recycle; a door that only unlocks with a very specific knack; scuff marks; washing drying over the back of a chair, a door handle or radiator; a tap that twists the wrong way and so floods the bathroom every time a new person visits and unwittingly unscrews the fitting by force; the onion smell of old shoes; curtains; passwords scrawled on the back of a receipt, stuck to the fridge, that are now the only way you can access your doctor, bank or gas bill; mouldy bathroom tiles; a half-painted ceiling; mismatched crockery; plants; people you love but who cannot – for reasons unknown to science – close cupboards.

Put that on an interiors account and just watch the “likes” roll in.

Nell Frizzell is a journalist and author of The Panic Years and Square One

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