I was lucky, I suppose, to grow up in London, scarcely four miles from the Charing Cross plaque that marks its very centre.
In this city, I could be someone, or anyone, or everyone, I wanted to be — but there was a cost.
In L M Montgomery’s classic novel, Anne Shirley, a garrulous red-headed orphan girl, is sent to Green Gables, a remote farmstead on Prince Edward Island off the eastern coast of Canada.
Deprived of space and nature in childhood, I imagine lounging on the porch in the evenings, the door propped open with a conch shell behind me.
I would be equally happy in this four-bedroom home on the west coast, on the market for C$3.95m .
I imagine the fraying tempers of commuters packed on to the Underground — the dense, artificial air and pulse of sulphur-like lights — and I am sure that I will need more space and time.