This Must Be The Place

I’m stood in the kitchen one evening making dinner: pearl barley, boiled greens dressed with lemon, salt and olive oil, slow-roasted cherry tomatoes and soft manouri cheese.

The kind of thing I like to cook midweek. Simple ingredients, treated with enough care to become more than you might expect.

Everything came from our local market earlier that day. There was no grand plan. I bought what looked good and worked out the dish from there.

It is the end of our second week in the new flat in Kraków. After months of travelling, packing, logistics and admin, we are beginning to establish something resembling a routine. Boxes containing possessions we have not seen in months are slowly being emptied.

A sense of permanence is returning. I find it comforting.

People often ask what those months of travelling taught me.

It is a big question and not one I have a complete answer for. Maybe I never will.

But one answer keeps returning. Travelling taught me to notice what allows an ordinary day to feel good.

Adam Mickiewicz statue, Krakow.

When you keep moving, each place is inevitably compared with the one before. After a while, the obvious markers of somewhere good become less reliable.

A boutique hotel can look perfect online, with crisp linen, wooden furniture and Aesop toiletries, then disappoint because the service is poor or traffic passes outside. A £12 room in a family home in rural Sri Lanka may offer less polish, but far more warmth, with home-cooked meals and mangoes picked from the garden.

I became less interested in how a place presented itself and more interested in the kind of life it made possible.

Of course, being able to ask where I genuinely wanted to live was itself a privilege. Money, work, family, citizenship and accident of birth narrow the options long before personal preference enters the picture.

Yet I realised I had given far more thought to my career than to the place in which I wanted the rest of my life to happen.

With every place we visited, I became more aware of what I needed from somewhere I might eventually call home.

Walkability. Calm without lifelessness. Enough activity to keep me interested without constantly demanding my attention.

The possibility of small rituals: a market, a familiar café, a pub, somewhere to wander without first deciding where I was going.

I began testing places through repetition. Could I set out for an interesting walk without planning a route? Was there a market I wanted to return to? Could a café become familiar rather than merely good?

I understood this most clearly one morning on Sifnos.

I was sitting on our terrace when the scent of a nearby fig tree drifted across. Looking to my left, along the road winding up the hill, I could just make out the supermarket where we bought fruit, Greek yoghurt and milk.

Further along, somewhere among the patchwork of whitewashed buildings clinging to the hillside, was the bakery we visited each morning for bread or a pastry.

In the opposite direction, the coastline and the sea.

There was no grandeur to any of it. No famous landmark in view. Only the ordinary things that gave our days a rhythm, contained within a small stretch of land.

A holiday can make almost anywhere feel easier than it really is. I did not suddenly decide that Sifnos represented a perfect life, or that we should move there permanently.

It was simply a moment when many of the things I had gradually realised mattered to me came into view at once.

Simplicity.

Beauty without ostentation. The freedom to move. A sense of life happening around us without becoming intrusive.

Kraków does not need to imitate Sifnos. It only needs to make some of the same rhythms possible.

A small church in Sifnos

Two weeks into living here, I am beginning to recognise them.

A short walk before breakfast takes me to Plac na Stawach. I am starting to learn which stalls have the tomatoes I want and where the raspberries taste sweetest.

We are discovering cafés and working out where to return for coffee, along with which bakeries make the bread we want at home.

Most places I need are within walking distance, with different routes I can take depending on my mood. There is a steadiness to life without it feeling boring.

Two weeks is far too soon to know what Kraków will become for us. The flat remains unfinished, and there will be frustrations we have not yet encountered.

But some of the conditions are here.

Back in the kitchen, the meal is ready. I plate up the food and sit down with my wife. We still do not have a dining table, so we eat from bowls on the sofa.

Everything on the plate had come from nearby, but it did not need to become a recognisably Polish meal.

Living somewhere is different from visiting it. Not every meal needs to prove where you are.

It was only dinner in an unfinished flat.

But it felt like a life we could repeat.

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