And perhaps she was right.
But someone else said: Home is where the heart is
And I've discovered that's exactly how I feel.
I live by myself (if you exclude a couple of adorable, if extremely stupid house cats) and though I am extremely relaxed and comfortable in my scrappy rented flat, it isn't where my heart lives.
You can't really feel at home unless there are memories associated with a place and you don't create memories without other people around to make things happen.
Obviously my family home holds a big part of my heart. It contains my parents and Christmas and still quite a lot of my wilfully discarded belongings! I forget to give my parents notice about coming "home" aka visiting them. I eat all their food, enjoy their extensive TV channels and spend hours in their insanely brilliant bath using all the hot water and/or lotions and potions. I'm the daughterly equivalent of a cuckoo!
But there are other places I enjoy being just as much, although hopefully I remember my manners a little better when visiting!
Her house offers a beautiful family kitchen with church pews either side of a giant wooden table. Radio 4 is always on in the background and the Guardian is kindly left out by a benevolent adult who rose several hours earlier. Many a group "morning after" breakfast has been consumed here. I must owe the family dozens of loaves of bread and boxes of teabags by now!
In winter there is an open fire and usually home made sloe gin. In summer a large enchanting garden, with gin and tonics and croquet during the day, and bonfires built by her father after dark.
You know the house parties described in Agatha Christie and classic 20's fiction? This home is as civilised as that.
I can only hope that I'm half as welcoming if I ever own a family home.
I know every inch of its undulating terrain. I know what line to take over the uneven tree roots, when to look left for the best sea views and exactly when each hill is going to come to an end.
I am reassured by knowing the mile markers along the way: the second bench, bird road, the lighter coloured fence, Kylie corner (the same new Kylie song started on the radio as I reached it 2 runs in a row). I could go on, the route is more nicknames than road names in my head now!
I know I've reached these places before and so I must be able to do it again. The familiar sites pull me forwards when I'm tired and thinking about quitting. When I need inspiration/distraction I can take a decent guess at where I'll be able to see a bunny or bird and I know exactly where to find great views of the Forth bridges.
I'm currently training for a marathon and logging dozens of miles a week. This means early mornings and long runs and hours of lonely training. I hear tales of people getting tired and run down and sick by the stressful nature of this kind of undertaking.
These people are definitely not lucky enough to have the Fife coastal route on their doorstep.
But thankfully I am.
I work in a beautiful theatre, really beautiful, classically beautiful. Design and architecture and the Victorians and a chandelier and a whole lot of money have combined to create a palace for the eyes.
And don't get me wrong, I love the beautiful bits of the building, I could gaze at them for hours. But it's the boring, boxy, un-theatrical, practical places where I feel at home.
True they have theatrical names: the green room and the quick change room, but it's only their occupants which add any sense of drama to the locales. Otherwise they are merely a couple of rooms with an above average number of seats in them.
The green room is where the company hang out/eat/sleep/watch TV/do jigsaws/generally pass time between shows (in the case of actors during shows). After years at my theatre ours is basically an extension of my living room. We flop on the sofas, drink tea and turn on the TV to discover that we can watch the second half of a black and white war movie or come dine with me. It's a chilled place where conversations are silly and open and honest (until the news comes on, then we have a serious half hour) and the only rules are that we never watch Hollyoaks and everyone has to do their own washing up. I sometimes wonder is people in more serious professions flop onto sofas with their colleagues reading out trivial pursuits cards and yelling the answers to Pointless at the television.
The quick change room is where we head once it's time to get working again. We sit in there after the half hour call until the show starts and head back during the interval. Again there's more tea and chat. Theatre is basically run on tea and chat. Somehow the confined space and limited time scale for communication leads to a playful air of silliness. Jokes are told, crafts are created and "would you rather?" questions are posed. There's laughter. Lots of laughter.
People tend to dress up.....I favour the unicorn......
We had a picnic table outside.
But I can't remember ever going to that table and not being greeted cheerfully. Be it by my backstage colleagues, the in house staff or the actors. We ate and played and chatted together. All sat around a simple wooden table. The place to be. The place we all homed to.
And that's what it's about really.
The places you home to because you feel at home there.
Because you feel happy and relaxed and welcome.
So maybe Dorothy was partially right...there's a few places like home.