I don’t intend this column to be a country and western lament but allow me to adjust my Stetson before I tell you that I have lived in a caravan during five different periods of my life. The first, and I was barely a toddler, was after we’d moved from naval digs in the Highlands to a caravan park in Hounslow. My Dad had got a job at Heathrow as a ground engineer with BOAC (the British Overseas Airline Corporation) – this was shortly before it became British Airways – and the airport was a short motorbike ride away.

The second was in the early 1980s when my folks were building a house in an Oxfordshire village on a strip of land used by foxes to escape from the hunt. This was long before Channel Four’s Grand Designs but even the solipsistic teenage me would have acknowledged there being enough drama without the need for Kevin McCloud showing up with his sensible questions and sceptical eyebrows.

I should also say, without a hint of Hank Williams’ raspy Benzedrine ’n’ booze baritone, that the other times don’t really count, as they were holiday related and for some reason all in Ayrshire: the first a week with my family in the mid-80s when we walked our dog on Maybole beach, fed the swans at Culzean Castle, and my Mum spent time with her terminally ill Dad; the next a break near Turnberry with my girlfriend, in the same month Johnny Marr left the Smiths; and another merely a night’s stay just up the road but 23 years later in what was once Butlins in Ayr (a holiday camp when my Mum worked there one summer in the late 50s/early 60s) for a kids football tournament with Leith Athletic.

The latter must count as the coldest place I’ve ever slept, even outdoing our student house on top of the hill at 76 Spital. (Imagine the Bates Motel relocated to Old Aberdeen, overlooking Pittodrie Stadium and handy for lectures, the Red Lion pub and the Kyber Pass take-away.) It was so cold this caravan that not even an evening of pints and shots with other parents at the post-tournament reception helped – and was Alan Rough really the guest of honour or has my memory hallucinated that?

When I did manage some sleep my dreams were not of Roughie glued to the spot like a Subbuteo goalie on the end of a stick as Zico curled a freekick past him and into the top corner – and I refuse to type the words top bins – but of Peppy the Fox’s Glacier Mint polar bear. Peppy’s nemesis of course being the over-excitable sunglasses-wearing mascot for Cresta. It’s frothy, man, my cold white furry arse.

So no, this is not a Paint Your Wagon scenario, even if as a kid I loved to watch The Virginian, and I’ve never ridden a horse, not unless you count a seaside donkey ride. Maybe I have caravans on my mind because it’s three sleeps till we go on holiday, not one involving a caravan this time, and my thoughts are as much about trips of the past as they are of us soon to be walking in the footsteps of Dante’s exile in Verona, drawing on Jan Morris’s book about Trieste to explore one of Joyce’s favourite cities, or visiting Bartók Béla Boulevard when we reach Budapest. Which is more bees than bothered Winnie the Pooh when he tied himself to a balloon and floated up to the honey tree.

For aren’t the ghosts of all yesterday’s holidays likely to be found sculking in the corners of our sub consciousness? That time in the south of France I puked on my younger brother one night but chose to pretend it hadn’t happened and went back to sleep. Mum, why am I covered in sick?

Our wee one keeping a lizard called Spirit in a match box until our final day in Ibiza. Dancing to the Happy Mondays in a tiny club opposite Fenway Park. Watching a green turtle lay its eggs in the sand. The kids feeding the camels at a Bedouin camp in the Negev desert. Seeing them surfing for the first time on a beach near Portsoy. The kids, not the camels.

And no, I don’t mean this to be a sad country song but, whatever our sense of belonging to any particular set of co-ordinates, I do wonder if perhaps we weren’t all born under a wandering star.