My shirts reeked of onions; my father hated the ‘phoney Tudor windows’. That flat will always mean home | Michael Rosen

Six decades on, in my mind's eye I can still walk around those rooms and hear my parents' voices

• In our end of year series, writers and public figures remember the place or time when they felt most at home

It's odd - and revealing - that 62 years after leaving the north London flat where I was brought up, I still think of it as home. I can still remember the telephone number: Pinner 1826.

I can walk round the flat in my mind, running my hand over the distemper" on the lavatory wall, Paris wallpaper on another. I can hear the geyser" spluttering hot water into the bath, smell the dying cat on my bed with its red hospital" blanket, see the man peeing on the moon on an inn sign, in Bruegel's painting, Netherlandish Proverbs, on our front-room wall.

Michael Rosen is a writer and broadcaster who has produced many books for children and a few for adults, too

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