Last year I was chatting with another writer and talk turned to council estates. The writer asked if I had ever lived on an estate myself. On and off, I told her, during my earliest life and then back again for the final eight or so years of my childhood. I had intuited that she and I were aligned in some vague sense, or rather that I didn’t have to be conscious of my performance as a polished, well-to-do author as I spoke to her.
“It’s funny actually,” I said, “my estate was once on this tabloid list that called them The Estates From Hell.” “Me, too,” she said, both of us delighted, “I’m from Ballymun.” And we smiled at each other.
