When I was about 16 or 17 my ambitions in life could be summarised as follows: get the hell out of Dumfries. It wasn't that the town I grew up in was especially deprived, or unsightly, or dangerous (at least not compared with the rest of western Scotland). It was, however, extremely boring. Two hours drive from the nearest major city, largely ignored by the rest of the country, it was and remains a backwater: poor shops, a dismal football team, and few cultural focal points. From my bedroom in Georgetown, a sprawling housing estate containing precisely one pub and thousands of identikit houses, I dreamed of escaping to what appeared to be the glamourous, Babylonian metropolises of Glasgow and Edinburgh. Anyone who has actually lived in either city will attest to how desperate I must have been to have formed this conclusion.

Throughout my mid-to-late teens, the highlight of my week consisted of attempting to get served in one of the boozers on Nith Place (not difficult, unless you actually wore your school uniform and a sign round your neck that read "I'm underage") and hoping there would be a decent fight to watch at kicking-out time. If I wanted to see live music, or visit a non-chain bookshop, or buy clothes from somewhere other than Burton and Next, I had to get my dad to drive me 75 miles up the M74. Add to this a backdrop of economic decline where wages remain 10 per cent below the Scottish average and the spectacle of empty shops has become an epidemic (thanks to Tom, an occasional commentator on this blog, for the latter link) and I knew I had to escape.

Unlike virtually every other part of Scotland, Dumfries and Galloway has no clear sense of its own identity. Think of Glasgow (Buckfast, sectarianism, Franz Ferdinand), the Highlands (hills, heather, midges), Speyside (whisky, fishing, rain) or even Dundee (jute, jam, the Beano) and you conjour up a host of associations. Dumfries, however, resonates with all the character and individuality of Lotus Notes. We had Robert Burns, except he was Ayrshire's, and he dropped dead just three years after arriving here. Or there's horror classic the Wicker Man, set in the Western Isles but filmed in Newton Stewart - a place described by its star Britt Ekland as "the bleakest place on Earth". Or there's the fact we can boast one of the highest rates of heroin addiction in the country. And, er, as Private Eye would say, that's it.

No doubt there was a degree of psuedo-elitism in my desire to leave (I fancied myself as an intellectual on the basis that I'd read Marx and Engels's Communist Manifesto twice, and understood some of it). But since I moved here aged nine, I knew I wasn't alone in seeking a way out. From 1829, when Elizabeth Crichton's plans to fund a university in Dumfries were sabotaged by the five ancient Scottish seats of higher education - in an irony no novellist could invent, she built a lunatic asylum instead - Doonhamers saw education as a one-way ticket away from the town. As Dumfries's Wikipedia entry puts it, stagnation is worsened by "a noticeable number of inhabitants, many of a young age, emigrating to other parts of the United Kingdom to seek professional employment and further education". When I look at the Friends Reunited entry for my school year, the vast majority of my classmates got away at the first opportunity.

Well, I was one of them. After four years as a student in Edinburgh, the city of my birth, I didn't much fancy returning. Instead, like so many young Scots, I equated "getting on in life" with "moving to London". I packed off down to the capital and blended in with all the other rootless young irritants who make up its meejah industry. Insofar as I had any plans for the future, they consisted of sticking around the south-east for a decade or so to make my name before possibly moving back to the Athens of the North. Dumfries was like the mad woman in my attic - forgotten about, neglected, smelling vaguely of effluent.

So it's fair to say I didn't see myself, at the age of 26, returning to the Queen of the South. Still less did I envisage living with my parents so late on in life. I know that it is apparently now fashionable for twentysomethings (or the ones whose mummies and daddies can afford to continue bailing them out indefinitely, anyway) to act like Ronnie Corbett in Sorry!. But since 18 I always equated independence with having a place of my own. And for all that I will be eternally grateful to my folks for acting as a safety net when my tumour was diagnosed, I can't help but feel slightly belittled about returning to the nest at an age when half the world's men expect to have sizeable families of their own.

Still. After six months in Dumfries, I'm starting come round to the place in a way that I never did as a teenager. All the things I hated about it back then - the insularity, the lack of ambition, the smallness of scale - now seem thoroughly refreshing after the bewhildering maelstrom of activity that is London. If I want to get to the town centre, I walk there in 15 minutes, not pay through the nose to cram into an underfunded tube train. As I've said before, the capital was bad for my health - I spent so long commuting and working I had neither the time nor the energy to exercise and eat properly. And when I breath in the air, it is fresh and clean - I'm no longer inhaling the cocktail of soot, dust, exhaust fumes and Sarin that I had to negotiate down south.

For all that Galloway is ignored by the rest of the country, it contains some of the most incredible scenery anywhere in the UK - like a combination of Cornwall and the Lake District. Living on the very edge of town, if I'm lucky I might see and hear owls, rabbits, foxes, eagles and red squirrels, all before lunchtime. On my way to the gym in the morning I walk past a paddock containing a silvery-grey Shetland pony. If I'm not in a hurry I'll stop to feed her grass. I couldn't do that when I lived in Willesden Green.

Fair enough, my new-found affection for the place is contingent on me not sticking around too much longer. In anticipation of getting the medical all-clear I'm applying for jobs and doing the odd bit of freelance work (nothing that the DWP wouldn't allow, benefit snoops). And the sooner I return to my old life, the sooner I'll consider this little episode over. But the experience has given me an affection for my hometown that I never felt before. My 16-year-old-self would be appalled.