“You want to know about the debts then?”, Alex asks, and with that his interview begins, with none of the opening conversational dance that often takes place, helping to make the process feel less formal, more relaxed. He is here to tell his story and he does so without fanfare, sitting in a dreary station café, competing with the clinking of crockery and intermittent train announcements. He avoids eye contact, jumps to the safe parts of his narrative and those at the forefront of his memory, back-filling the gaps and letting the absences speak louder than words.

Alex’s debt story began in 2015. He was living with his wife and their two boys in a two-bedroomed house in the south east of England, where they had lived for seven years. He worked full time in a warehouse and his wife worked part time in a local supermarket. Their boys were aged eight and six. Joseph, the eldest, played the trumpet, which he had recently started learning at school, and Max, the youngest, was a dedicated Minecrafter and football enthusiast. Life was busy but ‘pretty average’ and financially they managed, just about. While the household income did not allow them to save anything, it helped to keep them afloat. With their joint monthly earnings of around £2,200, Child Benefit of around £135, tax credits of around £100 and Housing Benefit of around £150 each month, they managed to pay their rent (£900 a month), the bills (including Council Tax, gas, electricity, water, the television package, mobile phones, school meals and trips and the boys’ hobbies, which amounted to around £1,100 a month) and run a small second-hand car. Alex had two credit cards, his wife had some store cards, they had a catalogue account and an overdraft facility, and they considered these ‘extras’ necessary for living a life that felt far from extravagant but which enabled them to do more than just scrimp and struggle – to buy decent clothes, to upgrade the computer when necessary, to take the boys on holiday once a year, to go on the odd day trip or for a meal out, or to take the boys to the cinema at the weekend.