I’m back home again in E12, the land of poets, amidst Byron, Shakespeare, Wordsworth and Coleridge, on the corner where Browning meets Shelley. While I’ve been away the world has seen Brexit and Trump, but in East Ham we’ve got a new Hindu temple and another Romanian café. The entrance to the swimming pool has moved and my cat won’t eat cat food any more. But at least the tube announcer’s voice sounds just the same.

It was never going to be entirely like being back in the green England of old though. The streets are full of Bengali, Russian, Romanian, Tamil, Urdu and Polish, while the occasional fragment of English drifts from the mouths of teenagers, indigenous East Enders and shockingly middle class white thirty-somethings. Mangoes, coconuts, peppers, herbs, bananas and sacks of onions are swamped by mysterious knobbly vegetables. It still feels exotic going into most shops, wandering through aisles of rice and flour as Bollywood music plays, or along shelves of packet soups and tinned meat imported from Lithuania.

In one shop window the gods are wrapped in plastic, while in another, colourful and glittering sari fabrics hang luxuriously off elegant mannequins (the one with mechanical praying hands which went up and down all day has long since gone). At the Lucky Centre you can find bouncy balls, screws, toys, buckets, light bulbs, pens, feather dusters, and everything you could possible need. Betting shops, pawnbrokers and pound shops dominate the southern end of the High Street, but as you wander north into Manor Park the best vegetable shops appear: 6 mangoes for a pound! 10 rotting peppers for a pound! Batternat squash! Spanyhs! Salary! 5 hot papers for a pound!

To try and get myself into the feel of Britain, I’ve been reading the Lonely Planet guide to Great Britain. East London is not recommended. I say all the better for us. The day I arrived home we went to see the bluebell wood in Wanstead Park and it couldn’t have looked pettier. Since that brief period of sunshine it has been almost consistently overcast and grey. But I’ve swum in the cold water of the North Sea and my homecoming is complete.

So now I’m back, but I still don’t know what I’ve come back to. Part of me never wants to stop travelling and seeing new places, and another part of me wants to stay at home all year baking bread and cleaning windows.

I think what I most want to do is to start exploring my own country in the same way I’ve been exploring other countries. I’m curious to see if travelling around England will feel different from travelling in other places. And having encountered so much national pride in other countries, I’m intrigued by the United Kingdom with its tensions and embarrassment over nationalism.

But for now, I think I’ll stay put – I’m still watching things here in Manor Park.