AS A teenager growing up in a North Yorkshire village, I longed for the day when I could pack my bags and leave for a new life somewhere else, a life of my own.

Not that I had a dreadful childhood, quite the contrary. But I wanted to carve out a life where I could be more independent, where I could go to parties every night if I wanted to and where I didn't have to be home by a certain time.

Above all, I wanted to experience a different environment to the one in which I had grown up. I didn't want hills, fields, streams or moorland. I wanted streets of houses, rows of shops and high-rise blocks.

Who cared if they completely blotted out the sun? At that age things like that didn't even enter my head. I wanted back alleys, bedsits, traffic jams, the whole urban experience. I wanted a night life that didn't involve travelling 20 miles on a bus that came as often as the space shuttle circumnavigates the earth.

So off I went off to become a student in Newcastle. But I hated it. Apologies to all Geordies, but I found the city depressing and the night life awash with lager louts. So after only a few months I headed south to London, and loved it from the minute I got off the bus. It really had a buzz to it and it was so far removed from anything I was used to. I thought I had really made it despite living frugally in a run-down house at the unfashionable end of the tube line. I was reluctant to go home, even at Christmas.

Most of my schoolfriends left home at the same time as me, to carry on their further education in different parts of the country. But some stayed behind and I felt desperately sorry for them. I could not grasp the fact that they were missing out on so much - going to the same old places and doing the same old things, when there was so much more out there.

But staying behind is not so unusual. A survey by a supermarket group found that by their mid-30s, a quarter of all adults still live in the town or village where they were born. Northerners are most true to their roots, with a third (32 per cent) of those questioned in Yorkshire, the north east, north west and Scotland staying close.

That there are those who want to stay is great because if everyone of a certain age suddenly left an area the implications would be far-reaching. And it is a lovely thing to find someone who has been so happy that they genuinely do not think that the place they call home can be beaten.

My parents have never left their local area and I believe my friend who vows that even if she won the Lottery, she would not leave her home in a village just outside Bradford.

For my children, however, I want the world. Though hard to admit, and however acutely I would suffer from empty nest syndrome, I want them to want to leave home and become little Michael Palins, to discover far-off places (and I don't mean Sheffield or Nottingham).

I wish I'd done that and I know that if I had I would have benefited from it.

Once they leave school I will pack their bags and sling them out. I will hand them their passports, wish them luck and put them on the train to King's Cross. It sounds cruel, and because I love them I would never do that unless they wanted me to. I just hope they do it for themselves.

Updated: 09:27 Tuesday, October 19, 2004