Home

My mother used to half-sing, "Home again, home again, jiggety-jig" - or something to that effect - to my brother and I when we were small boys as we approached home, usually after a slightly long and perhaps tiring journey. It was a chant of happiness but, thinking back and remembering the ditty, it made me think about the idea of 'home'.

One thinks of a place as 'home' automatically. It's not something one consciously decides. A house or bungalow or flat (the above picture shows our first home, a flat in Stone, Staffordshire) or whatever it is, becomes home when one feels, deep down and not necessarily totally logically, that one belongs there. Not that one owns it - so many of my homes have been company houses or rented accommodation or belonged to my parents - yet they still became, for a time, home.

It usually takes some time, from the moment of moving in, for a place to become a home. In some cases that time is very short: when we moved in to Matenderere (above), the house we built in Kilchoan, a house which we'd designed for ourselves and watched rise from a rocky patch of brambles, bracken and coarse heather, it was home almost before we moved in. In other cases, while I may have called the place home, I never really felt I belonged there.

I have known people who have only had a few homes - one I can think of has only had two, and those a few hundred metres apart - and in some ways I rather envy them. My count of the minimum number of places I probably felt were 'home' is - Dar-es-Salaam, 2; Mombasa, 4; England while my parents lived in East Africa, 2; England after my father's retirement, 5; with Mrs MW, 14; making a total of 27. In most of those homes I was very content - certainly so in 4 Lodge Road, Maldon, above - in just a few I really wasn't, so while I thought of them as home I wanted to be elsewhere. Once Mrs MW and I were free to make our own decisions, we didn't stay in those homes for long.

Twenty-seven is a ridiculously large number of homes to have had. I didn't have much choice with the thirteen I had while dependent on my parents but the fourteen we've had since then seems excessive as so many of them were either in lovely places - Ludlow and Kilchoan are examples - or in exotic parts of the world - Jamaica, Rhodesia (above is our bungalow in Rhodesia) - yet we moved away. As a teacher of geography I used to say that people migrated for two main reasons: they were PUSHed out and/or they were PULLed towards. We were pushed out of some - sadly, the two exotic ones - and pulled towards most of the rest, sometimes by expectations we placed on them which were disappointed.

I don't see us ending our days in our present house, not because we dislike the area or the locals but because the house is too big and unsuitable for two ageing people. So perhaps I'll write occasionally about where, if we were able to wave a magic wand, might be the perfect home in which to end our days. The Hoey House, on the beach at Nyali near Mombasa (above), would certainly be a candidate.