In the early 1980s, I lived in a flat at 76 Severn Grove, in the Canton area of Cardiff. It was a big Victorian house, and a typical student or first-jobber sort of flat. The rent was twenty quid a week, and I lived there for three years with my boyfriend at the time, Mark Cavendish.

It was a minute attic flat. The landlord had knocked up a cheap hardboard wall and made one room into two, so we had a living room and a bedroom, but the kitchen was the size of a desk and we had to keep the fridge in the bedroom. We needed 50p pieces for the gas and electric meters, but it was always a struggle to keep the coins, and the meters ran out on us loads of times.

I met Mark at Cardiff University. He was studying microbiology and I was doing English, classics and Welsh. We met in our first year because his student flat – the boys’ flat – was downstairs from our gang of girls. We went to borrow coffee or sugar or some silly thing, and met them. In our second year, Mark and I lived together, sharing a house with eight friends. It was in our third year that we branched out into our own little garret.

Severn Grove was the first time I put my stamp on a place. I did it out in red and white. It sounds awful, but I was terribly proud. Mark and I painted the walls white. We scoured antique shops for furniture and bought a bookcase for a fiver, which I painted white, and a coffee table, which I painted in red gloss. We found paintings in a secondhand shop, including two of abstract flowers by a South African artist, which I still have.

Spider plants were the vogue, and we hung them from the beams. Long arms would sprout and mini spider plants would appear. We could never throw them away: by the time we left, it was like The Day of the Triffids. We kitted out the kitchen in red and white, too, and I even put fabric on top of the fridge, so it would blend in with the bedroom.

I’ve always been into food and, incredibly, used to produce three-course meals from our tiny kitchen. We had a dining table, courtesy of the cheap shops of Canton, and regularly used to entertain six. I’d make curries with three vegetable dishes and my own naan bread. I had an ancient gas oven, but it cooked brilliantly. Now I have an all-singing, all-dancing cooker in my country place, but the one in that tiny flat was 10 times better. The sitting room had a tweed bed/settee, so we could have people to stay. We’d listen to Fleetwood Mac, Al Stewart, Tom Waits, Eurythmics and music to cut your throat to by Leonard Cohen. I’d always be in ridiculously high heels. You can tell I am a 1980s girl, because I still am – unless I’m trekking up a mountain.

Our flat was better than the places most of our peer group lived in, although we did have to share a bathroom with the flat Sian Lloyd, 49, presents ITV National Weather. Last year, she broke off her engagement to the Liberal Democrat MP Lembit Opik after he began dating one of the Cheeky Girls. She has homes in north London and Powys A sunny interval Sian Lloyd downstairs. It tended to be clean, because they were postgrads, not wild students throwing parties. There were five flats in the house, which was owned by a psychology lecturer called John. He provided loo roll and, every Sunday, he would clean the bathroom. He lived in a house that he’d built in the garden of the property. There was no garden for us, but we were close to Pontcanna Fields, a huge green area.

After I finished at Cardiff University, I got a scholarship to Oxford, to do a BLitt in Celtic studies. Mark stayed in Cardiff, and I would go back two weekends out of three; by coach, it was a good 2½ hours. At Jesus College, I had a nice room that dated back to medieval times, with wonky wooden floors, but I really missed our red-and-white flat.

In the end, I decided academia wasn’t for me. I didn’t complete the course. I went back to Cardiff to work at the Cardiff Broadcasting Company, a new commercial radio station. Then I got a job as a researcher at the BBC. That coincided with Mark and I buying a house in Penarth, west Cardiff, for £25,000. I was on a proper salary and Mark was in computers, which were just taking off.

Mark and I were together for 14 years, and he is one of my best friends in the world. He and his partner regularly stay at my country place. Lembit Opik and I bought the property together. My new boyfriend, Jonathan, and I, love being there above anywhere on earth.

Canton is now incredibly gentrified, the place to live in central Cardiff. It is media city, with private members’ clubs, lovely restaurants and boutiques. Severn Grove is off a main road through Cardiff. Sometimes, when I’m schlepping up to the Beeb, I find myself creeping down there and looking up at our old attic flat. It’s exactly the same. When I look back, what I did there with so few resources was interesting. Nowadays, I don’t think twice about paying £700 for a wonderful Welsh tapestry. But I am prouder of what I did at Severn Grove, with pennies and scraps of material from the market, than of anything I’ve done since. ]

Interview by Rosanna Greenstreet

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