When I flew to North America I looked out of the plane window down at land brown and vast and felt, for the first time, no connection to what I saw. I was a stranger to it.

The school I went to had its own reverend. I think in one of the assemblies that he addressed that he talked about the feeling of coming home when he saw the arch of the Humber Bridge. I sort of knew what he meant, but only really sort of, because for me Hull means the turbid thick brown water of the River Hull, not even of the Humber, and it means the wrought iron bridges that would sometimes make me late for school if a boat were coming down the river so that they had to cantilever up. Also something about the smell of creosote on wooden fences, and the smell of chocolate (not there anymore) near by the permanently raised bridge recently visited by Banksy.

There is something about the physical landscape of a place that ties me to it, even places I haven’t been before. Birmingham greets me as though we’re good friends. The first time I came to East London it felt like we had something in common. Maybe I just like places of migration and movement, places with people and change. That vast landscape beneath the plane (Greenland?) was empty, so high up, and as terrifying as the ocean.