Why leaving home is about more than the people we miss.

Yesterday afternoon, something quite ordinary and yet deeply significant happened, at least if you’re from where I’m from. A Flemish cyclist won Paris-Roubaix. For many people here in the UK, that sentence won’t carry much weight. But back home in Belgium, and especially in Flanders, it means everything.

Cycling isn’t just a sport for us; it’s part of the cultural fabric. For many people, it’s through cycling that they come to know Flanders at all. The Spring Classics, especially, are deeply rooted in who we are.

I have, in the past, tried to recreate that familiar feeling from my living room here in the UK. I streamed the race, made sure there was cake and chocolate; small rituals that echo how these moments are usually experienced back home. But it wasn’t quite right. Something was missing. The atmosphere, the shared excitement, the hum of Flemish commentary in the background, the post-race interviews, the inevitable conversations the next day with colleagues. All of it. And it struck me, as it often does in moments like this, that even after nearly fifteen years, there are parts of home I still miss deeply.

Of course, when you move away from your home country, people expect you to miss the obvious things: family, friends, your language. And you do. You miss them in ways that are immediate and sometimes overwhelming. But there’s also something quieter, more persistent running underneath that: a pull towards the things you didn’t even realise mattered so much.
It’s the smaller, almost invisible details. The ones that never seemed important until they were gone.

The way the air smells after rain. The background noise of everyday life: the radio jingles, the tone of announcements in a supermarket, the rhythm of conversations happening around you. The cultural references that require no explanation back home but fall flat elsewhere. Childhood TV shows, songs everyone knows by heart, actors and personalities who feel oddly absent in your new life.

And then there’s another layer to it, a slightly unsettling one. The realisation that your home country doesn’t stand still while you’re away. It moves on, quietly and steadily, without you.
Actors you grew up watching, who feel so present in your memory, have long since retired. Conversations with family and friends are dotted with names of public figures you’ve never heard of. Cultural reference points shift, and you find yourself just slightly out of sync. Even the things that once felt like anchors—like cycling—begin to change. Hearing about races second hand, rather than living them in real time alongside everyone else, dulls their edge just a little.

It’s in these moments that the distance feels less physical and more personal.

These are the things that shape your sense of belonging in ways that are hard to articulate. They sit in the background, quietly reinforcing the feeling that you are part of something shared. And when they’re no longer there, or no longer quite yours in the same way, you notice.

You learn to function, of course. You build a life, establish routines, maybe even feel settled. From the outside, it can look like complete integration. But there’s often a thin, almost imperceptible layer between you and that feeling of being entirely at home. You can understand everything, and still feel like something is just slightly out of reach.

Moments like yesterday bring that feeling into sharp focus. Not because they are monumental in themselves, but because they carry so many of those small, accumulated meanings. They remind you that home isn’t just a place, or even just the people in it. It’s made up of thousands of tiny, unremarkable details that, together, create a sense of ease and belonging.

And when you live away from it, you don’t just miss the big things.
You miss the texture of it all.

And sometimes, you’re left wondering exactly where that texture belongs now and where, in between it all, you do.

Perhaps this is something we need to hold onto when we work with multilingual learners, children and adults alike.
When someone arrives in a new country, they are not just learning a language or adapting to a system. They are navigating the loss of all those small, invisible details that once made life feel effortless.

And maybe, understanding that really understanding it can help us build spaces where they feel a little more at home.