Best of homes, worst of homes Sep 2017

We moved regularly so there was a constant sense of being an exile. My mother disliked living in Africa and was always complaining about the shows she was missing in London’s West End. She was a city girl and wanted to get back to the UK.

It was an itinerant existence and there was never a sense of being rooted or attached to anywhere. Even though it was all very comfortable, you always felt you were living abroad in temporary circumstances.

I shared my mother’s opinion about Africa in the sense that children tend to be more influenced by their mother’s emotional state than their father’s. He adored Africa and first went there before the Second World War. He loved the night sky, the air, the great distances and the open spaces. My mother just had agoraphobic attacks.

The plus side was that school was over by noon because of the heat. The day was your own from then on, and you were pretty much thrown on your own devices. For adults there was golf and adultery. For children, there were books and imagination. That sense of rootlessness stayed with me for a long time and left me with no desire to find a place I could sink roots into. But while I’ve carried these itinerant ways with me, during the past 10 years, my attachment to places has grown.

I can now feel a very strong association with a place and I have that sense with the house I live in now, in East London. I’m incredibly attached to it and it has become important to my family in providing that necessary sense of home and place.

We’ve been bringing up our young children here and for them it’s the only home they’ve known. This feeling that you belong somewhere really does matter.

A.C. Grayling is a philosopher, author and professor of philosophy at Birkbeck College, University of London. His latest book, Towards the Light: the story of the struggles for liberty and rights that made the modern west, will be published by Bloomsbury in September.