For a long time into adulthood if I ever dreamt of home, that home was always the house we’d moved to when I was three years old - an unremarkable, sixties built semi-detached in rural Hampshire. We only lived there for a couple of years before moving to Hong Kong, where I was to stay for the next twelve years of my life, but we kept the house and returned to it every two years for four weeks or so over the summer. Some of the most enduring memories I have are of those times, and in particular of first arriving back at the house after any of our two year stints in Hong Kong. For me at that time, England was the ‘different’ country, our holiday place, where the air was cool and it was light at 4am and after my bedtime, and in place of traffic noise and the whirr of a ceiling fan, wood pigeons cooed outside my bedroom window. Everything was simultaneously novel and yet comfortingly familiar. Even fifty years on I can still recall my nervous excitement on the trip from Heathrow to our home, spilling over into pure joy as our village, street, and finally house came into view. Our home, preserved in time, unchanged since our last visit. Held like a faded, sepia image in my mind as we lived our day-to-day lives in the heat and humidity of a bustling, electric city. And now we were back for four blissful, school-free weeks among fields and cows and Spar shops with penny sweets. It was utopia.On those return trips the friends I’d left behind would sometimes ask me about my new home in Hong Kong. Sitting on a hay bale, or on the low brick wall of someone’s garden, or perched on a kerb with our knees around our ears they would wonder what it was like to live in that place I went to when I wasn’t with them. They weren’t really interested, and I have no memory of ever replying. Back then I wouldn’t have known where to begin, and in truth I still don’t.