Living in Cambridge is like living in a commune.

At least, it is for me. No house I've lived in feels like home, but the city does. Guess that's understandable when you look at the number of places I've lived in in the 5 years I've been here.

I was cycling up to Great St Mary's to sing for one of the more peculiar weddings I've ever been involved with yesterday morning quite early for a Saturday (rehearsal started at 10). September is really here in the mornings - I'm pleased to see it. It was cool and quiet in town. No tourists, no students. The city takes a breath before diving into the new day term year.

I can go to places and know I'll see someone I know. I can feel a sense of possession of the place. It is mine and I am its, at least for now. It is intensely familiar, after the closeness of our relationship. My life has been played out against a backdrop of the ancient and the beautiful in a large but tight knit community.

I will miss it, this place. It is enormously strong, but also very peaceful. I need not to be here any more, this much I am certain of. I need to look outwards and upwards and destroy the comfort zones and start somewhere fresh. I will visit, and it will take a while for the bond to breakdown, but then I will be just a visitor. I don't think it will ever make me feel trapped the way St Albans does. Maybe sometime I'll come back here. It's a wonderful place.

Home

I have become reluctant to plan - certainly not to plan more than a month or two ahead. This is probably what's behind my failing to book singing with the Robinson choir types for the 18th April for AGES. It was too far away to commit to. I've been living a shifting life for a couple of years now, and I half resent closing down options. I should pick it up again though. I have holidays to organise!

For someone who doesn't like change very much but who has been rollercoastering around life for the past 5 odd years, I think I'm doing ok. It took a bit of doing, but I think I succeeded in transferring 'home' from being a place to being a state of mind, or an atmosphere, generated by people. I can keep in touch with them wherever they are in the world, and so I need never feel as completely alone as I was when I was uprooted from physical places I felt attached to. I love Cambridge, don't get me wrong. I'm comfortable here; I know where to find things and I know the shortcuts and there are beautiful places that I go to when I feel the need for them. But all of those things are not home, in themselves. The fact that I see people around all the time does start to make it home - the whole place takes on the feeling of a shared house; somewhere to keep stuff and feel comfortable. An old coat with huge pockets.

Maybe nobody creates home as an adult in the way that children do when it's the place that they've always known. Maybe one never recaptures the pure affection for somewhere in the same way. I adored Ashwell. It was an idyllic place to grow up. I wouldn't want to live there now, and I was in the end glad we moved to St Albans. I fused myself to that place, after initial resentment. My life revolved around the city, and I barely left it at all except for actual holidays for 8 years. It tore me apart to be told I wasn't going to have that base any more. Now, though, it's not friendly any more. It's dirty and smelly and old and I have to be someone I'm not when I go back there. I changed and it didn't feature in the change, and neither did any of the people who live there, so now we're not in sync any more. Like a couple that have split up in difficult circumstances who come back together later, hoping to find a little of the spark that had led to them being close in the first place, only to find that they really have nothing in common any more.

The people who mean home to me now do not necessarily live nearby, but they're always at the end of a phone or an email. I locate home in the airwaves, somewhere? Perhaps I do. If they were around, and some of them are, home is easier to pin down. Safe and comfortable.