Where is home?

Christmas seems as good a time as any to ask the question.
For the last two months, my unfixed abode has been Abu Dhabi, first in a hotel, then in the unfurnished flat of a colleague-to-be. Student style, I have slept on a mattress on the floor. I did buy a desk and chair, a small fridge and toaster but somehow this has not quite made it seem like home.

For a start, the man from the nearby curtain shop didn't take very well to my suggestion of selling me some cheap material to stick over the windows with tape.

He wanted to put up a rail; I thought that would be a sure way to fall out with colleague-to-be even before he starts work so settled for pages from the Gulf News and Sunderland Echo (pink football edition, sent by a friend though he didn't realise the use I'd find for it).


The office is where I spend most of my time, and even though we are now entering an interesting phase of our plans for the newspaper launch, that is clearly not home either.

Now I am back in London for Christmas and New Year. But after four years of living abroad, I no longer feel much affinity with the capital. Beyond the presence of family and friends, it has little to offer that I actually want. I am also freezing but that is another matter.

In nostalgic moments, I think of the North East of my childhood and youth and tell myself that County Durham is my real home. But then I realise I am probably indulging in self-delusion; I cherish brief returns, but would I truly feel settled in the highly unlikely event of living there again for the first time in 35 years?

When I return to the Middle East, I will - inshallah - be that much closer to moving into my own flat. I cannot bear the mattress on the floor any longer so will take a modest hotel apartment room in the centre of Abu Dhabi. The excitement of our project, and the knowledge that Mme Salut should soon be able to join me may induce feelings of belonging.

But for now, to give an honest answer to the question with which I started, I need to think back only to the check-in desks at the airport on Thursday. Alongside my queue for Heathrow were lines of other expats preparing for flights to Dublin and Manchester. And Paris.

And while two-and-a-half years in the City of Light most certainly did not, for all its attractions, make it the place I call or consider home, I did find myself envying that queue. Why? Because at the end of the journey to Paris, passengers are an hour's onward flight or a pleasant TGV ride away from Toulon, itself only 30 minutes or so from Le Lavandou.


Ask me again a few months from now by all means. But while wishing all Salut! readers a very merry Christmas and superb new year, I declare Le Lavandou still to be home. If cats could read, that thought - and with it the prospect of reacquaintance with the lizards and insect life (and other cats) of the Var - would be music to the ears of Monette, currently skulking about the house in dread of being put out in the cold and grey of London.