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talked about ‘maybe having another baby but once their debts are sorted’ (field diary, May 2014). If she ‘could win an amount, say like win the lottery’, she once told me, then ‘we could pay off our debt and buy our own house […] that would solve a lot of our problems’ (taped discussion, October 2014). Realistically, however, she envisaged that they would be ‘renting for a lot longer but we do want to buy. We want to try and get out of debt and get a pension sorted’. She fully expected that things were ‘going to get worse’ once ‘the full impact of austerity’ hit, particularly in terms of cuts to the state services and social infrastructures they relied upon (field diary and taped discussion, November 2014). All the meanwhile, the likelihood of saving for a mortgage and owning their own home, as a commonplace lifecourse aspiration (see Bailey 2009; García-Lamarca and Kaika 2017; Pimlott-Wilson 2017), was moving further out of arm’s reach. She explained: A mortgage on this house would be more than we pay in rent. But we couldn’t afford to buy this house but we can afford to rent it […] it’s [affording] the deposit. So I think, when we get the course out of the way, get married and then […] I think my mum and dad will help us out with the deposit. […] But obviously it will have to be written into their will, that I’ve had that from them already, so obviously my brother will get an extra thirty grand. You just don’t know, do you? You just don’t know what’s going to happen. (Laura, taped discussion, May 2014)
In this extract, Laura discusses personal and shared biographies simultaneously. Her studies are described a shared task (‘we’), as well as an important point in her career progression. This, along with getting married, marks a vital event in her lifecourse. She explains how their only hope for buying a house in the future was if her mum and dad would help them out. But if they were to do this, they would have to compensate Laura’s brother in their will, itself a direct reference to vital events in the lifecourse and entwined interpersonal biographies. She also indicates towards the uncertainty of her situation, which is also a common theme of the literature (see Stacey 1990; Wagner-Pacifici 2017) as well as the potential hopefulness of temporal contingencies and the unknown (Elwood and Lawson 2013; Hörschelmann 2011). In this example,
