"Fate takes us in strange ways and we end up in unexpected places. For me, it was the 70th move before I started my life in this country. I did not know that I would come to live in the lovely countryside of North Wales.

I had been around Europe quite a bit, but there were a few coincidences that made me choose at last to move here in 1988, although I knew almost nothing about this country or its people.

At the end of 1987 I was fleeing from my beautiful villa in Bavaria, after my husband had left me for our secretary. I had recently retired early from my professional activities as personnel and product manager in our own company because of my health condition that kept me in pain for almost every day. In this situation I needed somebody close to console me, but there was nobody. My mother, then aged 76, had left for a three-month cruise round the world. My daughter, a young doctor aged 23, had just returned from Africa and left for Munich to continue her studies. My son, aged 21, had joined his girlfriend to spend holidays in Ireland from where he did not return for more than two years. My only sister, one year older than me, was a busy doctor with four adolescent children, and we had never been really close.

What was I going to do? In a state of despair and suffering from a nervous breakdown I packed my most important things, including a concert guitar, and drove my new Audi 80 to the North East to pay a visit to my son. I stopped for a fortnight with friends near Frankfurt and continued my flight towards Ireland, taking the ferryboat in Hook of Holland and driving the long way from Harwich to the West Coast via the A5. At five oclock in the evening it was pitch dark, so I spent at the night at an old coach station in Cerrigydrudion in the middle of North Wales.

This was the turning point in my life. Only a few days' stay made me fall in love with North Wales and decide to remain here for the rest of my life. Only five months after my first sight of the country, in April 1988, I moved into a semi-detached house in Colwyn Bay, where I have been living ever since, which is the longest time I have ever lived in one place.

I often had to answer the question: Where do you come from in Germany? It almost seems impossible to give a straightforward answer, as I moved around so many times and, during my lifetime, Germany has changed its shape, size and national entity. Which Germany are we talking about?

I was born in Stralsund in 1939, a town in Mecklenburg at the Baltic Sea, which in 1948 became a part of the German Democratic Republic and, in 1989 was reunited as the new Germany. As my father was a naval officer, we moved around the seaside towns where he was stationed. Only a few months after my birth I was living in Swinemünde on the Isle of Usedom on the estuary of the River Oder, that is now a Polish town.

In April 1945 we had to flee from the Russians. On a freighter with hundreds of refugees, we heard about the temporary armistice and, at the same time, the death of my father, who had been on his first action as a commander of the U484 and was sunk south of the Hebrides in September 1944. After three weeks at sea, we came to live in a former camp for Polish prisoners of war where we all got ill with dysentery, and my little sister, only eight weeks old, died of malnutrition.

We were then evacuated to Lübeck, where we stayed for three months before continuing our flight to Western Germany and found a home at my great aunt's castle in Westphalia for one happy year. In 1947, we moved to Hanover where I went to school, now a citizen of the Federal Republic of Germany. In 1960, I started my psychology studies in Göttingen, married and moved to Mainz in 1963, where my daughter was born. After my exam, we lived for two years in Ispra in North Italy, where my husband had a grant for his thesis at EURATOM.

Back in Germany in 1968, I lived one year in a small village south of Frankfurt. Then I moved to the area round Munich in Bavaria, finally settling in the Eastern part of Munich. In 1979 we moved into the first house of our own in a village 50 km East of Munich, from where, after eight happy years, I left Germany for good in 1988.

Now, where do I come from? I feel European, not particularly German. My first language and my culture are German, but which of the different Germanys do I belong to? If I had been born only three months later, I would now be a Polish citizen. What is the point of asking for the place we come from?

I think we identify with the place where we live and are happy. And, after more than 15 years in Colwyn Bay, I almost feel like a North Walian person."