MIKE WALTERS

Facetious colleagues think my spiritual home has a licensee’s nameplate above the front door.

But the truth is a bit more poignant than pints and pork scratchings. Home will always be not just the house where I grew up but where I was born.

In fact, my brothers and sister were all born in the same house, in the same bedroom.

It’s 30 years since my parents moved out of the place in Rickmansworth, Herts, where, at one time or another, I must have broken every pane in the French windows with robust defensive strokes playing cricket in the back garden.

Sorry about that, Dad. No wonder you always kept sheets of glass and a tin of putty handy.

But with or without extra ventilation in the French windows, it was home.