I moved back to my boring hometown. As a parent, boring looks pretty good.

The author wanted to leave her hometown as a child.

Courtesy of the author I grew up thinking my small hometown was boring and couldn't wait to leave.

Housing costs eventually brought my partner and me back when we wanted to buy.

Now I appreciate the family support and community I couldn't see as a teenager.

I didn't think parking spaces would have a particularly big impact on my life, but ultimately, it was the thought of not having to parallel park on the street every day that made me realize I was going to move back to the town I grew up in.

My partner and I were trying to buy our first home together and hoped to stay in Oxford, the city where we had lived for the past five years.

I was speaking to a real estate agent about what we were looking for, and he raised his eyebrows slightly when I told him our budget.

He told me that if I wanted an off-street parking space within our budget, we needed to consider smaller towns outside the city.

There was one town which we knew very well, as I'd grown up living there, 25 minutes away.

My parents lived there, and we went back often, so my hometown was the obvious choice for our move.

At first, I resisted the idea of moving back home Initially, I was resistant because I felt moving back was a cop-out.

I'd remembered growing up feeling bored and like I couldn't wait to move somewhere else, but when the agent showed us what we could get for our budget — a house, with parking and a garden, rather than a tiny flat with no outside space - the maths and the logistics started making sense.

We were planning to start a family in the not-too-distant future, and I wanted to put down roots so the prospect of being close to my parents and a place I knew was appealing to me.

We decided to go for it, and 12 years later, I'm now raising my own kids in the same town where I grew up.