of the world.

Twenty years ago, I visited New Zealand.

We went at Christmas, and I remember leaving the UK on a frosty night, and the warmth of the air when we landed in Auckland.

My grandfather was born in New Zealand to Scottish settlers on the South Island, and although he was born in Dunedin, he grew up in a rural town, which we visited.

I felt a strong connection with him when I looked up at the surrounding hills, and imagined him looking up at them as a small boy in the 1890s. Many of his mother’s family are buried in the graveyard there.

In Dunedin itself I went to see the school he had attended as a teenager.

He came to England in the 1930s, settled in London, and married my grandmother, but New Zealand felt as much like home to me as the UK does.

In this country, it is Manchester that feels like home even though I grew up and still live in the south of England. It’s where my paternal grandmother and father were born.