The real secret of everlasting happiness? Never move house

IF I COULD board a time machine, go back and change one thing in my life, it wouldn’t be to make more of an effort to have a child, or adopt. Or to have worked in New York after I was fired from Marie Claire. Or to never have embarked on a diet. Or have had cosmetic surgery. Or spent so much on clothes.

No, no, no. Those decisions are mere flies in the ointment of life. The one decision I would change would be that, once I’d bought my first home – in a slum-clearance area in Brixton – I’d stayed put. Pulled up the drawbridge, put down roots and exhaled.

Not just because the road where my first house still nestles has long since been gentrified, with the small two-bedroom terrace now worth way over £1 million (I bought it with my sister in 1984 for £36,000; the mortgage interest rate was 15 per cent) but because it’s where I belonged.

Even thinking of that little house now makes me nauseous with nostalgia: my cycle ride to work each morning past Harvey Nicks, then through Hyde Park. The weekend I pasted floral-sprigged Laura Ashley wallpaper upside down.

My first love lived in Brixton. My first grown-up dinner party was in Brixton. I’ve just remembered that I once woke to find someone had tried to jemmy open the front windows, and I was once hit about the head at the bus stop opposite Brixton Police Station. But even crime fails to stem my ardour.

After the window incident, my late brother turned up unbidden, and slept every night on the floor to keep me and my sister safe.

Or maybe I should travel even further back, before I left for London, and make sure I stayed firmly in the town where I was born: Chelmsford in Essex.

My dad was born in a nearby village called Terling. I went back for a story not long ago. As I walked down the High Street – now pedestrianised, littered with artisanal street food stalls when in the 1970s there was only a Wimpy – I was reminded by the Odeon cinema (now a nightclub) of seeing The Towering Inferno with my friend Sarah: my love for Paul Newman surged afresh at the memory. Yikes!

The last time I stepped inside the department store (it used to be Bonds but is now Debenhams), my parents were still out there in the world, alive: cooking, weeding, trying to make my brothers get a haircut.

I couldn’t help feeling that if I still lived there, my parents would be around me: that lawn my dad slaved over, it’s still green and the moles still rampant. That ancient quince tree, whose fruit my mum turned into jam, is not only still alive, it has exploded into blossom!

SO THE news last week that at least a million fewer people moved house between 2001 and 2011 compared with 1971 to 1981 is heartening. The change might be due to lack of social mobility and housing, or soaring stamp duty rather than not wanting to leave the location of your first kiss, but as someone who has moved house 14 times, that can only be a good thing.

Like millions of baby-boomers I was seduced by TV shows such as Location, Location, Location (I actually hired Phil Spencer to find my farm in Somerset) and Grand Designs, and like many ambitious Londoners I thought moving to the country would be a breeze: just like staying in Babington House, but with no checkout time.

But moving away from not just friends but the familiar – the florist that did your wedding and your mum’s funeral, the local art-house cinema where you snogged your future husband, even the basement kitchen where you found out he was cheating – is scary.

Your past, like a tent caught in a gale, is ripped from its moorings, and disappears. Like many people, I moved house thinking, Ooh, once I’m there, in that dreamy location – I study new houses on Rightmove for hours, Google Earthing them, taking imaginary walks from the door and working out where my furniture will go – I will be happy.

It never happens, because you take yourself with you.

The most sorted person I know is my best friend. We met when we were 18, and she is still in the same townhouse off Mill Hill Broadway she lived in then. Her daughter was taken home there after she was born. Her mum still lives round the corner, and she sees her every day.

Last time I stayed with her, we reminisced about seeing the first Star Wars when it opened on Leicester Square in 1977.

I told her daughter, now 21, that her mum hasn’t changed a bit. Her hair is the same. Her mannerisms. Her face. But, most importantly, her house.