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We returned home to Puglia this week after a fortnight in the UK. We had no plans for the last couple of days of our stay and so we decided to head for Greenwich in South London. This was a homing instinct. Before we left the UK we had a house there in which we had been happy. We stayed in a pub in the middle of Greenwich and on our first morning I ran through Greenwich Park and across Blackheath to look at our old home, "the Lodgehouse". Here is a picture I took of it before we left the UK in 2002. Later I visited it again with Sue, who was keen to poke around outside and peer in the windows while I hovered nervously, not wanting the owners to see us.

Over dinner that evening we agreed that it had been good to look up our old haunts and that most of our memories of "the Lodgehouse" were good ones. It looks quite grand, but is in fact ludicrously small, as would be clear if there were a person in the photo to give a sense of scale. Nonetheless we have good reason to be thankful to this little house as the profit we made when we sold it funded a two-year sailing trip around the Mediterranean and our current house in Puglia.

Also on my run and later with Sue, I stopped at the top of the steep slope in Greenwich Park and looked out at my favourite view in the world - the Maritime Museum, Greenwich Hospital, the Thames and Canary Wharf. Despite living in another country I love this view more than any other because of what I am - a Londoner. And almost every element of the view has deep associations for me. For example, through the gap between the twin towers of Greenwich Hospital you can see a patch of the River Thames where nearly twenty years ago I anchored my little sailing yacht and helped Dad empty Mum's ashes into the murky green water.

Now we are glad to be back home in our peaceful Italian backwater, but with warm memories of where we come from, happy to have been there and to have come from there, but also happy now to be here. Sometimes I meet English people who live in Puglia who complain that they are here because Britain has "gone to the dogs" or some such place. Bizarrely, some of these "people" say that it is foreign immigrants that have driven them out, seemingly unconscious of the obvious irony that they are foreign immigrants here. For me, living abroad gives me more detachment about my Mother Country and the more detached I become the more I seem to appreciate its qualities.