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Where is home? If people ask me where I am from, I will invariably respond, Hull, despite having not lived there for twenty-five years. By now, I have lived the greater part of my life elsewhere, but it was in its proximity that I was born and raised. In our mind’s eye, it becomes home by default.

Ask the same question of our children, though, and Hull would be furthest from their mind. To them, it’s just a place they visited once which somehow means something to their dad, but clearly not enough to cause him to stay. To them, it is clear that even Ealing means more to their parents than that strange, windswept place up north.

Ealing is a place they know — land of rolling eyes in the back of the car, as their parents reminisce about their old flat, their allotment, their weekly grocery shop, moments spent with old friends, the journey to work, the local mosque and, of course, where and how they met. Ealing is the place of “You always take us to see your old flat” and “You’ve told us all this before!”

For them, home is this wee southern town, nestled amidst rolling green hills. This is where their friends are, where they go to school, the location of their home. Proudly, they are not like dad. “You went to Hymers Posh,” they say. “Your family were rich.” Apparently, I am not. “No, you’re common, dad.” Their youthful world is nothing like mine.

If there is somewhere else they call home, it is another valley nearly three thousand miles away, where they spent a portion of their childhood. That land of happy memories and independence, so unlike grey England. That place they perpetually yearn for, dreaming of their return. That is also home for them, stitched into their identity of self.

But ask my wife where home is, and she will not necessarily talk of that place. Those forested valleys invoke distant memories of early childhood — adventures with friends and cousins racing around that remote village — but it is in Istanbul that most of her youthful memories were forged. If we have built a home in the east, it is because that is the ancestral land, upon which all of the migratory relatives converge in summer.

So where is home for my beloved? She replies: “This is my home. Where I settled.” Ealing where she met her husband. This valley where she set up home and raised a family. And I guess I would say the same. The suburbs of Hull are distant memories: a different life, left behind when I left home. For as long as I have been away, I have also walked a different path. Home truly is where the heart is.