When I was a child, I used to grab onto space like a talisman: my father’s was an army family and we as children were constantly uprooted by the drip, drip routine of boarding school/holidays/boarding school/holidays. Often, we would return from a term away to a quite different army quarter, even a different country. I remember my mother telling somebody that the same year she and my father celebrated their twenty-fifth wedding anniversary, they celebrated their twenty-first move. England. Germany. England. Germany etc. Meanwhile, behind and under us all, was our family’s home in Scotland — for the large part of my childhood occupied by my grandfather. A big, old, grown-up house occupied by an old man and big pictures of people who looked like us. This, we were told, is your home: at least it will be. Whatever that meant.

This is not a thing to say to children. Tell them their home is somewhere they associate with a place at the end of a long, very often travel-sick stained, journey; wet summer holidays negotiating Edwardian plumbing; older ancestors still guarding their precious, unfathomable things and watching every jammy finger, every sibling scrap with disapproval — and you tell them they have no place. Further, tell them it will be their home another day — you tell them they have no home today. You tell them that a home is a house and a history and that their present does not count.

Parcelled up, thus, into a binary No Man’s Land around a big existential zero, I invested my self — my sense of self — in a series of rituals designed to give me corners, a backdrop and a pulse. One of them was about space: about me in space. On the first day of the summer holidays /on the first day of each school term, I would, as soon as I could be alone, take myself off down the drive of either house — curiously similar establishments, curiously similar drives, both rutted with moss and spat gravel — and, head down (occasionally over the handlebars of a bike) would chant, with feeling, and moving fast, ‘I’m here. I’m here. I’m here. I’m here…’ Speed and risk and faith were of the essence: if I managed to believe it before I fell off the bike or broke my stride or turned my ankle, the next section of life, the next sojourn before the next move, would be peaceable. I remember managing it twice, later on in my teens, and the elation was supreme.

I live, now, in a place of my choice under an enormous sky. I travel constantly. I find myself bewildered at airports. I rely more these days on clouds and light and sea wherever I can find it for an idea of space and continuity and identity. Earth seems tameable, ownable, less habitable, somehow: fickle and exclusive and no longer worth the risk.