Ugh. That phrase. Yuk. Don’t you just hate it? Brings out the 12-year-old in me. I don’t want to be all needy and sad, it’s tiresome. So I’ve stuck the feeling in a pot, drawn my specs down to the end of my nose and am inspecting it as if it’s one of my son’s little woolly caterpillars from off the path.

This week I am definitely ‘homesick’, but what’s it all about? A bit like that condition Vertigo, which doesn’t necessarily mean you are scared of heights, this homesickness I have is something different to what the name might suggest, something unplaceable (I’m afraid I can’t work out quite what, I’m altogether too homesick to focus).

It’s a misnomer, this business, because I’m not sick, and not ‘sick of home’. And I don’t think I actually want to go home. Well, maybe I do, in fact yes of course I do, but it’s odd because at the same time I very much don’t want to go home just yet – and that’s a good thing, isn’t it? Yes I badly miss my family and friends, almost physically, but what will be at home when I get there? And how would I feel if I landed back there tomorrow, literally in 24 hours? It’s not that. Is it the date? Fifth November, fireworks, bangers, bobby dazzlers on the Heath all scarfed up? Nope. And it’s not that I hate it here, that I loathe every day and want to actually leave. Mostly it is all lovely: my apartment looks like something out of a magazine, I can swim any time I want, I don’t have to wear much so getting dressed is a dream for a lazy dresser like me, and even if it rains my bones are warm. Oh, and there are palm trees outside my window. So it’s nice, this life.

But this week I am homesick to the point that I find it hard to get out of bed, I go to sleep sad and I wake up sad. Food tastes sad, I don’t even want ice cream, so at lunchtime I am sad and by dinnertime I am still sad. It’s got nothing to do with the amount of brilliant people I’ve met since arriving and without whom I would definitely be going home. And it’s got nothing to do with the brilliantly lovely people I’ve left behind.

I’m told it takes six months ‘to settle’, whatever settling involves, and we are three months in so I will just have to hunker down and weather it. Oh boy though – the lights might be on but I am definitely not in.