UNTIL this week I never noticed that today was an important anniversary for me, of something that changed my life more than any other.

It wasn’t the birth of a child or a marriage. It was more of a divorce. It’s exactly 30 years since I moved to England. At first it was for university, so I was at home for lengthy holidays. But the moment I boarded the flight to Luton Airport on the morning of October 2 1990 I was aware that I was severing ties with home.

And although I had at first expected to move back after my studies and work there, I knew I’d have a different perspective on it having lived elsewhere. I’d be seeing it from a different angle.

As it turned out I didn’t return, except on holiday. For various reasons, from jobs to relationships, I stayed here. Cumbria is a great place to put down roots. But during that first year away I began to realise that I probably wouldn’t be moving home. And the confident assumption that I would began to disintegrate.

Because on trips home I didn’t feel I quite fitted there. It was as if it had changed behind my back.

Things were different, people were different and all the certainties it had once offered no longer seemed so certain. I’m not saying there’s anything unique in this. Everyone who moves away from home comes back and finds it has changed, and it can be mildly troubling to find that the place can go on without you.

Perhaps it was different for me because my home town began to change very radically after 1994.

In August that year the IRA announced its “complete cessation of military activity”. No-one was quite sure what to make of it and at first it wasn’t widely trusted. But before long the other paramilitary groups, on both sides, also declared ceasefires – and everything began to change.

For those on the frontline such as police officers and soldiers the major change was a greater sense of safety. For other people it was the appearance of the place. It showed in the growth of new businesses.

McDonald’s had reached Moscow before it reached Belfast. The “big four” supermarkets of Asda, Morrisons, Sainsbury’s and Tesco, which had always steered clear of the province, set up shop there.

Even the centre of Belfast used to have a large number of one-off bookshops, music shops and cafes. Visit now and you’ll find Waterstone’s, HMV and Costa.

It was all unthinkable when I was growing up.

The businesses and the jobs they brought were called “the peace dividend”, and in most respects they were nothing but good news. But they did make home look like a foreign land to me. There were dividend hunters. Many of my schoolfriends had gone to university in England and got jobs over here afterwards. But some moved back, and others want to. The social phenomenon of the “yuppie” – the young, upwardly mobile professional person –

has long been familiar. There was also the “nipple” – the Northern Irish Protestant professional living in England. Cumbria has many, but across mainland Britain their numbers have fallen. The Good Friday Agreement came later and brought some kind of political settlement. Those who like to denounce Tony Blair should remember that before they do so. No other prime minister managed that. But the agreement is fragile, it has its opponents and there’s no guarantee that violence has gone for good. That’s why a hard border in Ireland or any tampering with the situation is playing with fire. Not all Brexit supporters seemed to realise that, or care. Moving 30 years ago today was a little troubling but also important. Everyone can benefit from it.

If you live in Cumbria you’re lucky to be in one of the best parts of Britain. But if you’ve only ever lived in Carlisle, or Penrith, or Whitehaven, you can’t truly appreciate that.

You need to go and live somewhere else in order to compare and contrast it with the alternatives.

That’s why I’d advised school leavers today to move away for studies or first jobs, widen their horizons and see how things are done elsewhere. You may come home and find it radically changed. But you may also realise just what a great place it is.

That’s impossible without the comparison. Rudyard Kipling wrote: “What do they know of England, who only England know?” You could equally ask: “What do they know of Cumbria, who only Cumbria know?”