What is 'home'?

Joanna Penn posed a good question in her blog (the Creative Penn) this morning - what does home mean to each of us? When I thought about it, it got complicated. West Sussex, where I was born, is always home - the deepest roots left undisturbed for the first ten years; when they were yanked up in August 1968 the uprooting left enough in the earth to keep me tied to the place. But when I go back now, I'm both deep-down happy to be there, and utterly bereft to have no place to be. I belong, but I don't. It also revives all the emotions of those years - good and bad. If I had the spare cash I'd buy a few square yards of land where I could put a shed: somewhere to call my own. A spot big enough to be buried in. My mother's ashes are there, and we planted a tree over them, with another tree for my father alongside. Some of my ashes will go there in due course, but not all.

London was where I lived for eleven years, but never home, not really. I love going back there because I know it, and enjoy driving in the city because I know I will leave before long.

Liverpool became home for two decades, and I loved it with a passion. Still do, and am writing this in the city on Grand National Day. It's the best of English spring mornings, cloudless sky, warm sun, not a breath of wind, birds shouting their heads off and the city full of visitors for the great Aintree spectacle this afternoon. But it's the one place I can feel lonely; since I sold my house here I have no base except with friends; because I love the city and know a lot of people here, I can feel isolated and disconnected when I'm footloose.

Transylvania - it's 1,500 miles away from Sussex, but it's the closest I've come to finding that deep-rooted connection with a place. Every time I reach the village - turn the last corner and emerge from the forest to that glorious view, there's that same feeling of being planted, the fundamental security of being held firm in the earth. It's the geology - from South Downs chalk to Carpathian limestone. Calcium carbonate, that grows beech forests and snowdrops, blackthorn and marsh orchids. Elements I absorbed from the veg and fruit my father grew in River echo in the food grown on the foothills of Piatra Craiului.

So this is where the rest of my ashes will be planted, under the same tree that blossoms in Sussex soil for my parents.

And you?