Author Deborah Moggach wrote These Foolish Things, which was turned into the film The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel

I’ve lived in CNJ territory for most of my life – why live anywhere else?

Back in the 1960s I remember walking home from Camden School for Girls and stopping in Parkway to buy a hedgehog from Palmers pet store – you could, then – so I could let it loose in the garden to eat the slugs.

In those days it was mostly Greek Cypriots and the Irish who lived in Camden Town, gentrification had hardly begun.

There was Woods the greengrocers and two fishmongers in Camden High Street, where they now sell trainers and tourist bric-a-brac, and there was a rag and bone man with his horse and cart. I loved it then and I love it now, despite the changes.

When my children were small we lived in Jeffreys Street, and for the Queen’s Jubilee in 1977 we closed the road and threw a street party. I borrowed a pony from the City Farm and gave the children rides and quite honestly it was one of the happiest days of my life.

I immortalised the street in my novel, Close To Home.

At that time our garden backed onto a secret jungle of buddleia bushes and butterflies, before that became a garden centre and then a block of flats. The children and I would climb over the wall and explore our secret jungle.

Later we moved to Gloucester Crescent, stuffed with the literati – Jonathan Miller, Alan Bennett, Michael Frayn, George Melly till he moved out.

Then I got divorced and moved out too, to Ivor Street, round the corner from Amy Winehouse, who’d walk past amiably sharing fags with photographers who walked backwards in front of her, snapping away.

Then I got a bit grander and moved up the hill to South End Green, where for 10 years I lived in a house overlooking the Heath.

Weirdly enough I’d written about those houses too, in a short story, speculating about the “unimaginable lives” of the people who lived there with their long front gardens.

Then, lo and behold, I found myself living that unimaginable life myself.

I had a dog and cat and chickens out the back, and when we opened the gardens to the public I gave the visiting children eggs.

It was magically rural. I had an allotment on the other side of the Heath and gathered wood for the fire and dandelions for the hens.

At night we’d swim in the ponds, watching the bats swooping in the moonlight.

My then boyfriend carved a lizard on the gate, and passing children would stroke it and give it lime leaves.

Another marriage came and went, and after some years in Wales I was lured home and now I’m back on the good old 24 bus route, living next to Queens Crescent market.

As they say, you can take the girl out of Camden, but you can’t take Camden out of the girl.

We all come back in the end.

Deborah Moggach is a novelist and screenwriter. She has written 19 novels, including The Ex-Wives, Tulip Fever, These Foolish Things, The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel and Heartbreak Hotel