As a foreign correspondent, home was never a fixed location. I’ve finally learned it’s about who you share it with

• In our end of year series, writers and public figures remember the place or time when they felt most at home

The first time it happened I wrote it off as inexperience. By “it” I mean lying on a concrete floor covered in cow shit and wondering how many bones had been broken by the cow I’d been trying to milk. Great skill is needed for the apparently simple task of attaching suction cups to a cow’s teats – especially if she has painful warts.

The cows hated me (rightly so) and I hated them. Maybe I mean feared rather than hated, but it amounts to the same thing. And the more experienced I became, the more I was forced to admit that my idea of a farm in Wales becoming the home I had always longed for was ill advised if not utterly stupid.