IT USED to get on my nerves when my dad spouted on about Yorkshire. I could not understand why he felt so incensed when, in the 1970s, his birthplace town of Middlesbrough was placed in the newly created county of Cleveland. “Does it really matter?” I used to think.

I couldn’t fathom my dad’s love of the North York Moors, which to me were dull and bleak. As we drove across them I’d yawn with boredom – there was nothing to see for miles except a few grouse flapping up here and there.

And I failed to grasp why Geoff Boycott was such a “great man” – to my dad his Yorkshire roots had as much to do with that as his cricketing prowess. The cricketer always seemed a bit arrogant and cantankerous to me.

For a long time I didn’t appreciate the county in which I was born and raised, and which was celebrated yesterday through the annual Yorkshire Day activities across the region.

As a student in London, I was convinced I’d never go back to live in Yorkshire. Who wanted heather and curlews, sleepy market towns and country pubs when you could have fabulous shops, amazing nightclubs and millions of people from all corners of the world? I admit to becoming a bit sneery on my occasional forays back home, wondering how on earth anyone could be happy living in such a backwater.

They say when you’re tired of London you’re tired of life, but as time went by I grew weary of London and began to hanker after the places of my youth.

I’d daydream about eating fish and chips in Whitby, meandering around Helmsley market, and boating in Scarborough’s Peasholm Park. Even the moors edged their way into my heart, and I’d think about the wonderful sunsets we’d see as we returned home from days out.

Yorkshire is special, and I began to realise that. Most important of all, I felt quite strongly that my children should be born and brought up in the white rose county, so a return was always on the cards.

I haven’t regretted coming back and have spent the past decade discovering Yorkshire with my children in the same way that my parents did with us.

Even my husband – a Lancastrian – grudgingly admits that he likes living in Yorkshire and acknowledges that my mum’s Yorkshire puddings are the best he’s ever had.

I now fully grasp why my dad was so outraged by Middesbrough’s removal from the county and why he still puts North Yorkshire on letters to the town. I understand all of this.

I love Yorkshire. But I haven’t changed my opinion of Geoff Boycott.