I am just back from England, where I spent the first nineteen years of my life, so supposedly my roots are there. I say supposedly because with each passing year that I spend a dutiful two weeks in the UK, I have a greater desire to return to this Mediterranean island, despite the heat, mosquitoes and hordes of sweaty tourists.

I am abandoning the romantic notion of home. The literal sense of home died with the death of my mother in her Sussex haven seven years ago. Of course those withered roots still make their presence felt when I dream I am flying over the Seven Sisters cliffs at Seaford or wandering over the Devonshire hills. Memory and the subconscious like to dig up bits of nostalgia every now and then, especially when they know how unlikely it is that you get to revisit those landmarks of your childhood. And even if you do, memory has painted an idealised picture which the new reality fails miserably to live up to. Or, even worse, there is a housing estate on your treasured fields.

I was grafted onto a foreign tree over 50 years ago and even though that re-rooting was debilitating and painful for a while, now those roots have grown deep and sturdy in what was an alien soil. They need the salt infiltrated water, the light, the harsh summer sun and mild winters to survive. They also need the people, the friends, the language, the colour, the food, the cicadas, the smell of pine resin, the guardian mountains.

Most of all they are nurtured by those friends: Spanish, English, Mallorcan, Irish, Welsh, Jamaican, Norwegian, South African, German….. Where else but here, in this crucible of nationalities and cultures, where tolerance is the key word, would I want to live for however many years this old tree can keep standing?

In a sense, Mallorca is an example of how the uprooted, asylum seekers or not, wanderers and adventurers, can live together in relative harmony. Increasing migration and immigration is unavoidable, so perhaps we should take note of the enriching coexistence of the inhabitants of this singular archipelago, the Balearic Islands.