Neil Ansell has lived in Brighton for 12 years now. It surprises him to realise it’s been that long.

For many years the writer lived a wanderer’s life, squatting in houses until he was evicted then picking up his few possessions and moving on to the next adventure.

He has travelled through nearly 100 countries and lived in more homes than most of us will clock up in a lifetime. But children change things and his commitments as a father now keep him (mostly) rooted in the city.

It’s a life that would at one time have seemed a fantasy and which could easily have been very different.

As Ansell detailed in his first memoir, Deep Country, he met his ex-wife and the mother of his two children while he was ostensibly living a hermit’s life in a cottage in the wilds of Wales. They were both attending a friend’s wedding in Northumberland and somehow went on to forge a relationship split between her home in Kent and his cottage in Wales – a leap of faith that lasted for ten years.

The couple picked Brighton “almost out of a hat” as a good place to bring up kids. Ansell got a job working for The Big Issue at its office in the city and had to adjust to working with 30 homeless people, where a few years previously he had lived entirely alone, sometimes not speaking to another person for weeks at a time. “I sometimes feel,” he says, “like I’ve lived a series of different lives rather than one.”

His latest book, Deer Island, is the story of another of these lives: the time when Ansell lived among London’s homeless, first as part of the Simon Community and later as a squatter. Moreover, it’s about the competing need both to belong and to be separate.

It was the start of the 1980s when Ansell chose to join the Simon Community, a floating group of volunteers and rough sleepers whose purpose was to offer companionship and support for one another.

He can’t articulate exactly what led to the decision – “I’d met someone who worked there and thought it sounded incredible. I’ve always had this adventurous streak.”

In the end, he stayed for three years. The community invited its volunteers to adopt a policy of voluntary poverty and, like everyone else, Ansell gave up all his possessions.

“I soon found that it was not only possible but liberating to live with no possessions whatsoever. I had food and shelter, and if I needed clothes there was a donated pile to choose from.”

Life was rewarding but intense – “You were never, ever on your own” – and by the time he left, he was exhausted, worn out from sleeping on floors but most of all worn out from making friends with people and then having to watch them die.

After a period travelling, he returned to a London that was still in the grip of recession with no real qualifications and no money. After choosing poverty a few years previously, this time poverty seemed to have chosen him and unable to scrape together the money for a deposit, he ended up squatting.

For a while, it worked out well. Then there was what he describes as “a hostile takeover” by new residents more interested in flogging the house’s fire surrounds than finding a place to sleep. As the situation spiralled into nightmare, “I started feeling I was losing control over my own destiny,” he says.

Eventually he beat a retreat to the remote Scottish island of Jura, where he found a redemption of sorts.

The story was rather more complicated than that, of course. The point at which the book ends was actually followed by a return to squatting before a woman Ansell had met through the Simon Community offered him her cottage in Wales on a peppercorn rent, and he began his next life, spending five years in almost total solitude.

But the constant battle between retreating and returning continues, he says, and after 12 years in Brighton he is nurturing hopes of heading out into the wilds again.

“I think there’s a part of me that will always want that. There’s almost a creative tension between my desire for adventure and my desire to belong but I feel I can pick and choose more now.

“I can adapt from one to the other because I’ve gone to the extreme in both directions.”

  • Deer Island is out now, published by Little Toller Books, priced £12