Where do you call home?

I was discussing my next trip to the UK with a friend and said I’d like to try something different and was thinking of sailing to the UK then flying home.

Home, I do this all the time, I refer to where I live as home. Don’t you all?

When we lived in the UK and I had coffee with a friend, as I was leaving I’d say something like ‘well I best get off home now’ or ‘On the way home I’m popping to the shops’

Technically my ‘home’ is Cwmbran, but I haven’t lived there since 1974, and then we moved to Stoney Stanton and York, then to Ross-on-Wye in 1982. My parents now live in Monmouth, but I never lived in that house so I don’t consider it as my home.

In South Africa if you ask someone where they are from, they tell you, where they were born, where they consider home.  If you want to know where someone lives you must ask ‘where do you stay’?

Before the move to South Africa we lived in Malvern. If I met people and they asked me where I was from, I’d reply ‘Malvern’ not ‘well I’m originally from Cwmbran, via Stoney Stanton and York, now living in Malvern’

I’ve been here 3 years, this is home, where I live, the kids may be back in the UK with the rest of the family, but when someone says where are you from I always reply ‘I live in Centurion, but yes I’m from the UK originally’

I’m off to Dubai next week and if someone asks me where I’m from I’ll respond ‘South Africa’ that’s where I travelled from, that’s where I’ll return to and that’s why I call South Africa home.