Being a traveller is different from being a wanderer. There's a purpose to it, a reason for coming and going. Throughout my 41 years as a professional traveller, I've boarded a plane on average once every five days and flown to 138 countries. But something else marks out the travellers from the wanderers: they've got somewhere to come back to. Knowing where you come from is an important part of knowing who you are.
In my case I'm British, and I love the weird, infuriating place. I couldn't think of living anywhere else. But Britain is a large geographical expression, which takes in immense diversity. You have to come from some particular place inside it. For me, that's Suffolk: quiet, peaceable, out of the way.
I don't live there, and I don't even go there much. But I do regard it as my homeland. My two daughters feel the same way: one chose to have her honeymoon there, the other got married there. And now that I've married again, and have a five-year-old son, Rafe, I'd like to persuade both him and Dee, my South African wife, that Suffolk could be their homeland too. So over the Whitsun weekend, instead of going to Paris or just hanging around in London, I've brought them to my ancestral heimat, with just two days and three nights to convince them. It's a bit like one of those daytime television shows: will I succeed or not?
We're staying in a magnificent place: The Ickworth near Bury St Edmunds, an enormous late-18th-century palace. The west wing has been turned into a hotel, with a reputation for being good with children. Unencumbered adults dine separately and more grandly, but parents with children have their meals in a charming gallery, while the kids career around outside under the holm oaks, jumping up and down on trampolines until it's time for the next course. Our bedroom is vast and beautifully appointed, and the three of us sleep in a bed the size of a tennis court.
'Bury St Edmunds,' my father used to say, 'is where our family first climbed into the gutter.' The Simpsons were peasants who had left scarcely a mark on history until a red-headed firebrand called Charlotte married into them and nagged her gentle, bookish husband George into migrating to London and setting up a building firm there. It was well placed to take advantage of the 1850s property boom, and the family never went back to Suffolk.
