There really is NO PLACE LIKE HOME

But when Yorkshire-woman 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?

'I love the Yorkshire moors and London's open-all-hours metropolitan fun'

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.