‘Where do you live?’ is easy. ‘Where do you come from?’ less so.

I used to answer ‘Chatham,’ until I realised that no one’s heard of Chatham. It hasn’t got a football team, and its only significant employer, the Dockyard, is long gone. So I’d say, ‘Kent,’ which sounded smarter anyway. And if no one had heard of that, ‘About fifty miles from London.’ Which, apart from the occasional ‘You mean, London, England?’, was usually enough, even in the eighties.

When I lived in Yorkshire, I’d give the same answer, because I’d assume defensively that the question was prompted by my giveaway estuary accent. When I was abroad, I’d say, ‘England’, assuming even more defensively that the question was a masked statement saying, ‘You obviously don’t belong here,’ and, as I was keen to be amiable, it helped people speedily pigeonhole me.

But they often asked, ‘Whereabouts in England?’, so I started to pre-empt with ‘Kent, in England’, or ‘Kent: it’s the south-east corner of England’ – the word ‘Chatham’ being far too much extraneous detail.

Personally, I never ask people where they’re from – or what they do. If they want to tell me, they will. Or it’ll come up naturally, and meanwhile I’ll avoid those self-presentation answers that are as curated as Facebook posts. I’m also scared of being misinterpreted as one of those ‘you-don’t-belong-here’ types. But when I overhear the question in our now super-mobile world, I’ve noticed that people often offer one of those ‘I was born in X but live in Y’ replies that have the advantage of covering both the ‘originally’ and ‘currently’ meanings of ‘come from’.

For many twenty-first-century citizens, it’s more elaborate still: ‘I was born in X but brought up in Y and live in Z, but my mum’s from A and my dad from B. Oh, and I mostly work in C.’ I’m not that interestingly complex but I can now say, ‘I was born in Chatham, but I live in Milton Keynes.’ And, when no one knows where either of those places is, I can still say, ‘Oh, about fifty miles from London,’ and cover all the options.

Lately, though, I’ve noticed I simply say, ‘From Milton Keynes.’ It’s understandable in one way. This year I will have lived half my life here – and the more recent half, which presumably gives it more weighting somewhere in my brain. I left Chatham when I was eighteen, and have never lived there since, and after that I was all over the place, mentally and geographically.

Of course, no one in MK asks me where I’m from: Estuary English is common here and there’s a critical mass of incomers. As for the outside world, MK does have a football team, and people in the UK at least have always heard of it, and if their reactions are as sniffy as when I said I was from Chatham, well, I’m used to that. So ‘From Milton Keynes,’ I say. Or ‘Milton Keynes, England.’ I guess that means something.