Where We Belong

Recipes This Week — Kotlet, Aloo Mosama, and Tomato & Chilli Jam + A Beginner’s Guide to Growing Your First Gardend

Reflections of the Week — On Belonging and All the Places We Call Home

I’ve been thinking a lot about belonging this week — how some people spend their whole lives searching for it, while others don’t realise they’ve been carrying it within them all along.

A friend and I were talking recently about identity. She’s European, married to a Black man, raising two beautiful mixed-race boys — and she said something that has lived in my heart ever since:

“Sometimes I worry my boys won’t know where they belong. They are Black and they are European — both sides form who they are and who they’re becoming.”

And that sentence… it has been sitting in my chest rent free.
Because the truth is, belonging isn’t guaranteed by blood, borders, or birthplace.
And sometimes, it’s the children who carry more than one culture who feel this most deeply — pulled between worlds that shaped them, yet told they don’t fully fit into either.

But I also think this feeling isn’t limited to race.
Belonging — or the lack of it — is universal.

You can be born and raised in England, speak the same, eat the same, live the same… and still feel like you’re floating at the edges, forever looking through the window instead of sitting at the table.
You can spend your entire childhood here and still carry the ache of being asked where you’re “really from,” as if your presence requires explanation.