I was watching an old Échappées Belles last night, about Corsica. One of those speaking was talking about his roots being there, and that being important, and I realised I didn’t really understand the idea. Maybe it’s a mix of patrimoine, culture, language …
What do you think of as your roots? Are they important?
And weltanschauung, as well as patrimoine, culture, and language. I think roots are very important but that you don’t always see just how important they are. But then I have a Corsican grandmother who was born in Saigon and the rest of them are equally varied.
I think I must be a Rolling-Stone… a nomad… as I don’t know think I’ve got roots in any one place… 
My roots are in many places, they are still roots and I value them, they have a strong contribution to who I am probably because of being away at school all my youth from 4 up.
We moved so often… that I think my roots must be with people and not places…
Yes exactly. I never really had a home, and never saw my parents for more than a couple of weeks a year throughout my life, that didn’t stop me having roots though 
and possibly all the stronger for it.
Like Stella I am a nomad. Army life, constantly moving and then, like Vero, away at school. There were occasions when I came home from school to find that home was in a different house or even a different locality from where I lived before leaving for school.
The nomadic life has continued ever since. I moved home in London 13 times in 25 years. I’m coming up for 3 years in FR after 5 years in ES.
Because my father happened to be posted in Catterick Camp when I was born doesn’t mean that Catterick Camp is where I’m from. We moved house three times before I was 10 months old!
I was 4 y.o. in 1953 on the ship to my father’s posting in SIngapore. Apart from a few weeks in UK before his next posting to BAOR, we didn’t get back to UK to live until I was 15.
My father’s father had died while we were in Singapore. We only paid very rare visits to his step-mother [“the old witch”] when we visited UK so the paternal ‘roots’ were non-existant. My father had, himself, been thrown out of the house and into the Army at age 14, spent some of the pre-WW2 years in China and then India, the Far East and Iraq 1940 - 1948.
My mother, born in Wolverhampton, ‘divorced’ her family at age 17 in 1937. She somehow enrolled and did her basic nurse’s training in the hospital in Kendal, Westmoreland, where she was effectively ‘adopted’ by the family of a local girl also training at the hospital.
From that time on my mother referred to Kendal as her home and this family as her parents. I knew they were not: to me they were Uncle Harry and Auntie Annie but the gap between fact and fiction didn’t register with me as bizarre.
As soon as she was qualified, in 1940, she joined the Q.A.s and spent her time 1940-1948 in India and the Far East. A prime opportunity to ‘disappear’.
She met my father on the troop ship bringing British personnel back to UK.
So roots on my father’s side were very sketchy and on my mother’s side non-existant. When people ask me where I’m from I say London. I went to college there after boarding school and then made it my home for 25 years, with a good deal of travel far and wide. I love living in hotels …
I will say “born in London- but lived everywhere across the UK”
Thank heavens for OH , who has been my rock and my anchor, bringing stability to my crazy world for the greater part of my life. 
Even so, we moved several times, but always to our “plan/project” which we were in control of… makes all the difference.
I think my restlessness has contributed in no small degree to my failure to get spliced to an ‘O.H.’
A regrettable incident, telling a g/f it was curtains to hear her wail, “But I thought we were going to have babies!”
Crikey! Close call!
I have a set of cultural roots, but not based on a particular place. Born in Vienna, grew up in SE London, lived in Oxfordshire 30 years but looking ahead to the next move.
And yet… you said not to France.
Was that to me?
I like France very much, but the challenge of language and culture as I get older could make life extremely difficult.
I was born and grew up in London, but have lived in 4 different countries. When my parents died, I felt that I had finally lost my English roots. It used to bother me, not feeling “at home” anywhere, but not anymore. I now consider myself a cosmopolitan, at home in various places.
I think of my roots as being a bit deeper in history, so 18th and 19th century traces that members of the family have made. I’m just a modern day sprig off those roots.
Yes, I can agree with that… the more that I discover about my ancestors the more comfortable I feel about being me … and I’m sure I’ve ended up in the right place
Challenges are what keep the little grey cells working…
But, of course, one has to be comfortable and relaxed with ones life and lifestyle, wherever that might be…
and it can be a bit of a juggling act sometimes, but (for us at least), well worth the effort.
I know folk who lived in France for years and years, but never quite got comfortable … hence they went back to UK…
It’s not a failure to go back… and I think they all enjoyed their time here… just, not enough.
Learning a language is a challenge, but as @Stella says, it’s a heathy one in terms of slowing cognitive decline, especially as one gets older.
My roots are solidly Warwickshire - my mother was from Kenilworth and my father from Rugby, and I was born in Coventry.
That said I spent only a few of my very early years in that area - my parents moved to Bournemouth when I was 6 or 7, and then to Guildford a few years later.
Since then I’ve lived in South-East London, and for a period of 7 years in the Turks & Caicos Islands - I’m now back in Guildford but (of course) contemplating a move to France when I retire.
I did however go “back to my roots” for my university degree - spent four years at the University of Birmingham! 
I don’t know if it’s roots but I have very strong ties to Wales. My father was Welsh but I was born and only ever lived in England. It’s strange but crossing the Severn Bridge feels like going home.
Strange, that feeling, isn’t it? Having been looking at my ancestral roots for a long time, as far as I can (very poor people are difficult to trace), they all, without exception, seemed to be in Somerset, Dorset, Devon or Wiltshire.
However, when my partner and I first started coming to France, we both felt like we were coming home once we crossed the Channel. No idea why…