Will Self

Yes.

The person who most liked phoning them up, he won't like being reminded of it, was a childhood friend of mine who's called Matthew Freud, who was very fond of persecuting Mr Smelly.

Well, that was the argument, self and Freud calling smelly.

LAUGHTER

I think it's being in the push chair, not the pram, though I have pram memories from the same period because there were two vehicles.

One was a push chair and one was a silver cross pram.

And one memory is being pushed along Brimmer Hill, the road in the Hampstead Garden somewhere where we lived, and seeing the view from Brimmer Hill across the Hampstead Garden suburb to St Jude's, the church in the centre, and beyond it, the northern heights of Hampstead and Highgate.

And the other view is Contrawise going in the other direction towards East Finchley.

So the council estate in East Finchley was called Prospect Ring.

And if you remember, Martin Parr did a book called Boring Postcards.

Do you remember that in the 90s?

I do remember that, yes.

Prospect Ring featured very strongly, to my brother and mine's delight... These were postcards, the most boring things you could imagine.

Yeah, most boring things you could see.

So Prospect Ring is still there, but much changed.

It's three or four point blocks arranged around a small council estate with a laundrette.

So Mum would put me in the pram with a pillow slip of dirty laundry and push us up to Prospect Ring.

And...

There was something about being pushed in the Silver Cross pram that even in my infant mind struck me as markedly different from the prospect in the other direction looking out towards Hampstead.

It's more or less, I mean, I've been writing a book on London suburbia.