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After more than a year of the pandemic, how has it affected people living the kind of lives she has written about? “No one’s really doing anything about destitution,” she says. She then mentions the government’s so-called Everyone In initiative, which found shelter for people living on the streets during the pandemic’s first couple of months, but was not repeated. And even that scheme, she says, could be cold and inhumane. Once again she mentions Darren. “When I saw him the other day, he said: ‘They offered me a place in a hotel, but I would have to put my dog in kennels.’ I just thought: ‘Bloody hell – how can you do that? How can you not see how precious his dog is to him?’ I think that lack of sensitivity and understanding is still there.”

Once we have finished the interview, Kavanagh walks me to Fitzroy Place, an office and residential development a stone’s throw from Oxford Street, completed in 2015. Its towering buildings are surrounded by the calm silence of wealth; a two-bedroom flat here sells for about £2.5m. She points out a patch of pavement nudging one of its outer edges, where she met a homeless woman called Carrie, who was 36 and said she had been homeless for 21 years, having experienced domestic violence and time in the care system. She was living in a tent.

“That really upset me, because she was only about a street away from where I live, and she invited me in. That was a really, really moving thing, to sit in that tent. But I was free to get up and go away, back to my comfortable place.”

One thing Carrie said stuck in her head. When she repeats it to me, the words sound almost like a prayer. They also capture the glaring inequality that defines both London and almost everything she portrays in her book: “I just want what everyone else has.”

Let Me Take You By the Hand by Jennifer Kavanagh is published by Little, Brown. To buy for £14.78 (RRP £16.99) go to bookshop.Theguardian.Com. P&P charges may apply.

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