The distressed dowagers and retired colonels have been displaced by financial advisers and holders of car franchises. The tennis courts, croquet lawns and Edwardian pebble-dashing have been ousted by garden gnomes, outdoor carriage lamps, car-ports and security garage doors. Betjeman’s fading gentility has been replaced with the Romford pretensions of Abigail’s Party. The mass-produced houses spread slowly like a stain across the land carrying with them God, gardening and golf But if the homes remain, their occupants have changed Old Suburbia has given way to New. For all his beady eye, he held in great affection this new tranche of society which took its identity from what it purchased.

An old divide was being broken down and trade names, like trade itself, were slowly becoming acceptable. Where other middle-class authors, like EM Forster and Evelyn Waugh, changed their accents and aped the manners of the aristocracy, Betjeman always sounded the same, according to another Acacia lecturer, the broadcaster Frank Delaney: “He was perfectly secure in that suburban society.”They are still there, the houses of Betjeman’s genteel folk, which grew in the London suburbs in the early 1920s. You hear it all the time.” She mimicks other voices: “Look at that funny lady. Her conversation is enthusiastically salted with academic words and phrasings, like “analect”, “sequestered”, and the “costive idiolect” of Europa. “No, I’ve never been to tea there,” she says regretfully, “nor met the Queen.

After unsuccessfully hawking his five-minute short around the festival circuit, failing in an application to London Film School (“Ha!, thank you,” he scoffs), Refn had just enrolled at Denmark’s Film School when a producer offered him pounds 1m to develop the short into a feature. This week Pusher, the first feature by 26-year-old Dane, Nicolas Winding Refn, rips open the seedy underbelly of Denmark’s capital, proving that here are mean streets to match Scorsese’s. A scabrous trawl through the city’s gangster underworld, the film is seen through the eyes of Frank, a heroin dealer who beats his best friend to a pulp, treats his girlfriend like dirt and scams money from his mother. “I wasn’t in control of those but I was beginning to have some control over the new ones.” Did she think that her art was brave? “No, it was just too exciting I had never seen myself in this light Suddenly my body wasn’t this blob I was actually quite attractive I was a sexual being!”This gave her a new confidence. If someone started to chat her up, she no longer got suspicious or worried why anyone would be interested in her. “I just started to go with the flow and to believe that people could find me attractive That was a hard thing to believe. I had taken on board all those things people say about disability: ugly, deformed.