Meeting my friends and family is turning out to be quite an emotional rollercoaster.

The last few days I've been playing catch up with all the latest news and all the gossip, as well as making a few trips down memory lane. I'm learning of marriages, moving-in-togethers, new homes, careers, boyfriends and babies, but also more sad news. I'm also finding out about lots of people I went to school / university with or worked with.

Every time, at the end of the evening, I have to say goodbye, which is making me really nervous about travelling. Unfortunately, I have not been able to see all of my friends, apologies, a week is just too short! I promise I'll make it up when I get back.

Apart from being good fun, it's a very sobering thought, because I realise how far away I am from it all by living in the UK. Things and people change so much and the months and years fly by if you so much as blink. Mum's side of the family is huge and I find myself struggling to remember all the new nieces' and nephews' names, very often I've never even seen them!

You also realise that your memories of a certain time or place have been Technicoloured: the bad bits have been airbrushed, the good bits coloured in. Sometimes, it's quite upsetting to be brought back down to earth. Your own view of the world is necessarily skewered and subjective and other people may see things very differently from you. I need to remember that once I set off.

It also made me wonder how other people see me and how I must have changed in their eyes. Living in the UK and aging a few years must have had some kind of effect on me, but of course it's hard to tell from where I'm standing.

One thing I have noticed is that I have become a lot more sensitive to comments about race or sexuality.

In the UK, where French Connexion is having trouble with it's fcuk t-shirts and where Eamon has a song with barely any words left in it because it has been censured to death, political correctness is at an all time high. Unfortunately, this does not mean less discrimination or racism, just that it's less overt. It seems that, in Belgium, it's still very common to call a spade a spade, and not avoid the issue.

For example, I was watching 'Sportweekend' and the commentator was interviewing two Belgian Paralympics athletes, one who had had cancer, the other an accident causing brain damage. I found the way he spoke quite offensive, and I thought it was quite rude that he was asking about how they got their disability. (Incidentally, the producers at the BBC forgot to make a ramp for Tanni Grey-Thompson, a Paralympic athlete at the 2000 Sports Personality of the year!).

When I spoke to mum about this, she gave me another interpretation: while everyone is equal, we are all different, and ignoring people's differences, or coming up with more and more euphemistic terms to describe them, is actually a form of discrimination too, as it implies that it is something to be ashamed of, something that should not be discussed.

I think it's a very different way of dealing with things, and it's amazing how easily you get used to it.