Personal

A sort of homecoming

Today I visited Suffolk for the first time since November and it felt like ... home.

This is all very strange. When I moved to Suffolk I was determined to spend no more than five years there. It took me ten years to leave.

I didn't see much travelling to the office, but I knew what was just over the horizon: the Deben, Shingle Stree and of course Angel Lane.

I'm sure these feelings were driven by familiarity and nostalgia rather than a sense that I belong in Suffolk. They may also have partly been caused by missing a feeling of belonging in Berkshire. Our home - our house - is lovely, but the sense of place extends not much further than the front door. The "here" where we live is a small here.

Rather than move back to East Anglia perhaps the solution is to turn that small "here" into a big "here".