The way I see it
But when Yorkshirewoman Sharon Wright fetched up in Surbiton, which would hold that special place in her affections?
My cousin cranes her neck round from the front of her daughter’s jeep to ask me a question. ‘D’you think you’ll stay, then?’ she asks. She means in That London.
We’re on our way back from a funeral in our home town in West Yorkshire and the conversation has turned a bit philosophical. ‘Yes, Pauline,’ I deadpan. ‘I have been there 20-odd years.’ She shrugs in a way that suggests I'll change my mind.
Look, I married one Londoner and spawned another. I live in Zone 6 and have an opinion on the Ulez. But… I do spend quite a lot of time online, furtively looking at cottages in God’s own county. My heart lifts when THE NORTH appears on the M1 road sign. I sing along to Jarvis Cocker as I drive across the bleak and beautiful Pennines. Yorkshire is in my blood and bones, I tell anyone who cares. Which does beg the question, why don’t I live there, then?
Because I set off on a round-Britain adventure in my 20s and fell in love far from home. Work wafted me around the country and eventually to London, and I’ve thrown down roots somewhere I could never have predicted. Or even knew was a real place. When I met my husband at a work do in 1998 and he said he lived in Surbiton, I laughed. I thought it was a made-up name for suburbia, coined for The Good Life.
But no, it wasn’t dreamt up for a 1970s sitcom, it’s a real place in south-west London. When we married, I settled in and settled down, while never quite losing that sense of being a stranger in a strange land.
I once quipped at a party, when asked how I ended up here, that ‘I married a Londoner by mistake!’ Then I caught the hurt look on my husband’s face. Ouch. ‘Joking!’ I said hurriedly. That wasn’t funny though, was it? I married him on purpose and we’re steaming towards our silver wedding, still happy as clams. It was a cheap shot, pretending that someone else is keeping me down south. I actually love London. It’s just that I love Yorkshire too. It’s like that old song, Torn Between Two Lovers.
I’m not the only one who hails from one place but made their life in another and sometimes wrestles with where the heart is. I have a clutch of midlife friends who feel the same. Siobhan is a Pilates teacher who grew up in Cornwall and is occasionally tempted to move back. For her, it’s the wild glory of the Atlantic coast that she misses. ‘When I walk along the cliffs, part of me always thinks, “I need to be here,”’ she says. A cliff walk isn’t a life, though. Her career, her friends and her in
