With you on the ‘oh, that wasn’t there’ thing. My home town has odd modern buildings downtown that I can’t quite imagine, and old landmarks have been bulldozed for supermarkets. Chav culture greeted me when I returned a couple of years ago, as a mutation of the Kappa-klad kids of my youth. An Irish expat told me that five years is about the time that you start losing that certainty that you can describe the specifics of ‘home home’ and not be talking about somewhere that no longer exists. I think I’m getting to that point, without the corresponding assimilation bit. Or rather, I think I’ve mastered the art of pretending to assimilate.

Still, there’s a digital equivalent to the expat Brit who becomes a Graham Greene parody of the stereotype, white-suited and gin-drinking. My accent was never likely to change too much, but phoning my parents every weekend locks it in place. I get to listen to Test Match Special and do the Guardian crossword. That, perhaps, was the original genesis of the white-suited shipping agent in New Guinea (i.e. my great-uncle) who could pin his identity to the fragments that came over the short wave radio and on the post-boat. Those, combined with memories of how things looked when you left, hook you to a little bit of the present and a lot of the past.

Parenting? You could talk more about this and still be geeky about it — what happens when you don’t have the usual concrete points of reference for on-the-job training — the people who raised you — while being the kind of person who laps up O’Reilly tech manuals.