Sounds like Hotel California. 
1 Like
Approx. 100 milesā¦has been further and as little as 10 miles.
Next move will take us further away 150 miles I guess.
Generally been due to changes of job but last was to support my wifes ageing mother who has since died.
Next will be so we can be closer to our grandchildren.
Going back to where I grew up is never going to happen for a variety of reasons but mainly as I dislike the place.
Bracknell, born & bred!
I have lived in the same city but in different neighborhoods all my life and will continue to do so, here is my family, my children, my grandchildren and everyone I love 
7 Likes
6187 miles (9957 km).
I got you beat. 
6303 miles (10,144km)
1 Like
This should be the title of everyoneās lifeās novel
3 Likes
162 Km from my home to my brotherās - a handful less from my sisterās.
I was born and grew up in Torino, Piemonte. Safe for a temporary stay in Roma between 55 and 58, I lived there, changing many homes, for 50 years.
I moved here for love and for my job in Milano. Now that Iām retired and love has moved elsewhere, Iāve decided to stay here. Not only I feel no need to reconnect with my roots, but I could move even farther, to some foreign place, new language, new ways of living.
3 Likes
Early years - 10228 miles (16355km)
Junior school - 6434 miles (10355km)
Senior school - 15 miles (10km)
Young adult - 142 miles (228km)
Take your pick. Another forces child here and have lived in many countries, some for years and some for months. Have also lived in many places in England, from London to the Lake District. I have never settled down and am contemplating another move, to who knows where. (thankfully Mrs G is also a nomad).
Mrs G and I consider ourselves to have failed at growing up, and hope we never succeed, although we have done some grown up things like work.
2 Likes
About a quarter of a mile. North Essex coast.
Moved to London at about 19 attracted by the pheromones of patchouli oil and rumours of free love.
After a few hip years met a local girl in the City. Found a decent job on the docks (Ā£14.10s a week) here,married and am now to old to move.
I live 100 miles/160km from where I grew up. I was there for 18 years, then Exeter for 3 at university, back to my home city for another 6 years, then I moved to where I am today, then London for 2 years, NYC for 2 years, Luxembourg for 6months, Netherlands also 6m, then finally back here. At this stage, this is home.
My wife and I looked at moving many years ago but until we looked at other places, and realised weād miss certain pubs, restaurants, sights, roads even, and people of course, we didnāt realise this was home. Neither of us is from where we live but āhomeā crept up on us! She does, however, want to retire from the country to the Devon coast. I came from the Essex coast to the country 30+ years ago. Iām not so sure Iām ready to leave my rural life behind.
My brother still lives in the house we grew up in.
Previous generations of my family from both my Motherās side and my fatherās side had to move or chose to move and many of them are buried in Massachusetts. My great grandfather was the most travelled though - from East Yorkshire to Barbados, St Helena, Cape Town, Alexandria, India and finally after an absence of over 20 years, back to South Yorkshire. Some of the relatives on his branch of the family are still in East Yorkshire, within a mile of where he started out, and have not left in generations.
2 Likes
5,268 miles is the furthest Iāve moved, from London to Phoenix. I started out in a small village 10 miles from Bath, but everything changed when we spent a year living in the center of Munich at Sendlinger Tor. Probably the most mind and life expanding experience I can imagine for a 12 year old from the back side of nowhere. These days my favorite mind expanding comes from music.
Born in Bermuda and came to England when I was 10. Started off living in Thetford, Norfolk then moved to Swaffham in Norfolk (19 miles). Moved to London (107 miles) to go to College and stayed on for another 3 years before relocating to Leigh in Lancashire (224 miles). A few years later moved back to Norfolk to a little village near Fakenham (192 miles) and finally settled in sunny Surrey (175 miles).
I am done with moving.
Here here! I still feel 18, and, whilst more nature than I was then, I hope to do many of the same things (but slower!).
Some things have been very odd - e.g. even when I reached the pinnacle of my profession, at high level meetings I still felt like a little boy, completely out of place, just acting as if I was a grown man knowing what I was talking about!
I have always felt like this - I thought I was the only one! I used to think - I wonder if they can see it, and if they can, what must they think of me?! I donāt identify at all with people of my own age group (Iām nearly 63).
In so many ways I feel I still see the world and life through the eyes of a child, though with the understanding and maturity that obviously no child can possess. Iāve felt like this throughout my adult life and I hope Iāll always continue to.
1 Like
Thereās a growing number of us aged children who just love going out to play. Seems a few of us are right here in this thread.
A long time ago someone told me: āyou donāt stop playing because you get old, you get old because you stop playingā.
3 Likes
I grew up in Southport Lancashire, moved to Birmingham for University (fantastic city and perhaps the most beautiful campus in England 114 miles), got my first real job in Peterborough in insurance (dull - 179 miles), transferred to Liverpool (insurance HQ) (20 miles) and then moved to Chertsey Surrey (240 miles) to join BA in IT. After 10 years I managed to convince my wife that suburban London i.e Chertsey, wasnāt right at all and weāve been in deepest West Sussex 262 miles from my birthplace ever since.
To be honest although itās very beautiful here and I do love the South Downs Iāve never totally bonded with the place - thereās too many pretentious/money obsessed people, everything is too expensive and it lacks āNorthern warmthā. Weāre here because it is pretty and it suits our work locations but we have few genuine friends here, a bunch of pleasant acquaintances and itās just OK.
As a result I think I still have one move left to make when we retire but the question is where. My current preferred option is Herefordshire because it seems to offer a combination of cheaper housing costs, Southern climate, nice countryside, good connectivity to most places and plenty of things to do from kayaking the River Wye to the Hay literary festival.
My wife who is Irish would rather like to retire to County Cork or Kerry but I worry about the rain and the remoteness from everything and everyone. The housing costs are very appealing though, as is the pace of life and the friendliness of the Irish people.
I love the countryside and have never been a town or city lover (although the 18 months I lived in Liverpool in my 20ās were fabulous and itās my favourite city on earth!) The people there are incredible, the arts and music scene is second to none, driving around that city is a joy, the architecture is wonderful - both my wife and I are in love with the place. It has always felt like a happy place to me despite the iffy weather. The reality is though I donāt see myself wanting to spend my retirement years there as I really do adore just walking in the countryside amidst peace and tranquility.
Over the years there have been opportunities to move overseas to places like the Middle East or China for a whole lot more money, but theyāve never tempted me at all. I love England for its countryside, ancient inns, the National Trust, the architecture and sense of history on every street, the friendliness of most of its people, its culture - music, art, painting, film and theatre. Itās pretty darned unique and special. What would be the point of earning 5x what I do now but living in the boiling bling of Dubai or the polluted hell of many Chinese cities? No National Trust, no grass roots music, no National Gallery or 500 year old pubs to savour a steak and ale pie inā¦
I think I see the UK through similar eyes to Bill Bryson the acclaimed American writer so perhaps I should leave the last words to him:
āIt sometimes occurs to me that the British have more heritage than is good for them. In a country where there is so astonishingly much of everything, it is easy to look on it as a kind of inexhaustible resource. Consider the numbers: 445,000 listed buildings, 12,000 medieval churches, 1,500,000 acres of common land, 120,000 miles of footpaths and public rights of way, 600,000 known sites of archaeological interest (98 per cent of them with no legal protection). Do you know that in my Yorkshire village alone there are more seventeenth-century buildings than in the whole of North America? And thatās just one obscure hamlet with a population comfortably under one hundred. Multiply that by all the other villages and hamlets in Britain and you see that the stockpile of ancient dwellings, barns, churches, pinfolds, walls, bridges and other structures is immense almost beyond counting. There is so much of it everywhere that itās easy to believe that you can take away chunks of it - a half-timbered frontage here, some Georgian windows there, a few hundred yards of ancient hedge or drystone wall - and that there will still be plenty left. In fact, the country is being nibbled to death.ā
Or how about this?
āSuddenly, in the space of a moment, I realized what it was that I loved about Britain - which is to say, all of it. Every last bit of it, good and bad - Marmite, village fetes, country lanes, people saying āmustnāt grumbleā and āIām terribly sorry butā, people apologizing to me when I conk them with a nameless elbow, milk in bottles, beans on toast, haymaking in June, stinging nettles, seaside piers, Ordnance Survey maps, crumpets, hot-water bottles as a necessity, drizzly Sundays - every bit of it.
What a wondrous place this was - crazy as (cluck), of course, but adorable to the tiniest degree. What other country, after all, could possibly have come up with place names like Tooting Bec and Farleigh Wallop, or a game like cricket that goes on for three days and never seems to start? Who else would think it not the least odd to make their judges wear little mops on their heads, compel the Speaker of the House of Commons to sit on something called the Woolsack, or take pride in a military hero whose dying wish was to be kissed by a fellow named Hardy? (āPlease Hardy, full on the lips, with just a bit of tongue.ā) What other nation in the world could possibly have given us William Shakespeare, pork pies, Christopher Wren, Windsor Great Park, the Open University, Gardnersā Question Time and the chocolate digestive biscuit? None, of course.
How easily we lose sight of all this. What an enigma Britain will seem to historians when they look back on the second half of the twentieth century. Here is a country that fought and won a noble war, dismantled a mighty empire in a generally benign and enlightened way, created a far-seeing welfare state - in short, did nearly everything right - and then spent the rest of the century looking on itself as a chronic failure. The fact is that this is still the best place in the world for most things - to post a letter, go for a walk, watch television, buy a book, venture out for a drink, go to a museum, use the bank, get lost, seek help, or stand on a hillside and take in a view.
All of this came to me in the space of a lingering moment. Iāve said it before and Iāll say it again. I like it here. I like it more than I can tell you.ā
ā Bill Bryson, Notes from a Small Island
4 Likes
Wow, thank you for that quote from Bill Bryston - it is a brilliant observational summary, and explains why, despite attractions of other places (e.g. climate, food, certain aspects of culture, cost of living), I have remained in Britain and only visit in other places,
2 Likes
Itās a wonderful book - probably my favourite book ever on Britain and I have read it so many times along with the brilliant sequel āThe road to little Dribblingā.
Be prepared to smile, laugh until there are tears in your eyes and cry in equal measure. He is an absolutely brilliant writer but he was never better than when writing about his beloved adopted country.
JonathanG
2 Likes
Brysonās comment about old buildings and people from the USA is something that always gives me an easy day out to arrange with American friends who are visiting the UK. I take them to Batemans, Kiplingās home in Burwash. They love the old building and wandering the house of a famous British author. There are more impressive National Trust buildings and grounds in Sussex but somehow I feel it captures an aspect of quintessential Britishness that makes it a lovely day out for them. Plus on the way there from home, we drive through one of the many places I lived in as a kid.
3 Likes
I find the problem, if I can put it that way, with Brysons books are that they are both a tourists view and are rooted in a past that never existed. They rightly celebrate the best of Britishness, but just go in to your local town and see the reality of life as most people live it.
2 Likes