Is it just ME?

Or is coming home the best bit of a holiday?

ON THE final day of a holiday in Japan, as I was queueing to buy tickets to Tokyo, a mobile phone started ringing.

The ringtone was the patriotic hymn I Vow To Thee, MyM Country. As the music swelled to ‘entire and wh whole and perfect’, I was ov overwhelmed by a lip- tre trembling longing for hom home.

It was a long slog to get back. TrainT to Tokyo, night in an airportai hotel, 12-hour flight, t train to London.

At ev every change, every check-in, every baggage carousel, I had only one thought: home soon. For however wonderful the holiday, however hot the sun and blue the sea, however glorious the food, art and scenery, there is no part of a trip that makes me quite so happy as the coming home.

It starts the moment the plane comes through the clouds — and there: patchwork fields! Pintuck hedge- rows! The Thames! Then, after landing, well-behaved queues at passport control (once you have queued at a Kyoto bus stop, you will feel new affection for the stoic British line-up).

Best of all — the first sight of the airport Marks & Spencer. Egg and cress sandwiches to eat on the train. Milk for the homecoming cup of tea.

I feel a sort of rapture at the key in the door, at being somehow back in one piece: luggage not lost, souvenirs unsmashed.

The thrill of seeing the Imperial Palace Gardens was nothing on the first night in my own bed, porridge in the morning and post on the doormat.

I vow on every return that I’ll never go away again. Home is too sweet.

But after a week, bored by routine, errands and brollies blown inside-out by gales, I start to think: another trip? If only to have the bliss of coming home.

I feel a sort of rapture at the key in the door, the post on the mat, that first night in my own bed