First person: BBC reporter Matt Frei on his family's nomadic lifestyle
We live on a quiet cul-de-sac in the Cleveland Park district of Washington DC. On a clear day, when the wind blows our way, we can hear the bells of the Washington national cathedral peal in the distance, which makes us think of England. The houses are overshadowed by giant poplar trees, and the architectural styles range from "colonial" (ie 1950s) to "federal" (ie 1960s). The Monday before last, the quiet of Tilden Street was interrupted by the arrival of black armoured SUVs with tinted windows, secret service sharpshooters and burly men with wires protruding from their ears, nervously surveying our neighbourhood for potential menaces.
This spectacle will repeat itself five times a week during term time for the next four or eight years depending on the whim of the American electorate. The Obama children are going to Sidwell Friends, the Quaker school at the end of our road. Amelia, my nine-year-old daughter, wants to switch schools so that she can get sleepovers at the White House with 10-year-old Malia Obama.
The arrival of the Obamas is just another reminder of the transient nature of the city we have called home for the last six years. Every time an administration changes, Washington undergoes a massive, tribal shift. In the freezing days of early January, Republicans have been leaving in droves, licking their wounds. It is the periodic transience of power, and Washington seems once again like a clearing house of warring tribes, and my children are already feeling its impact. At Alice and Amelia's American school, the change in administration means that some classmates leave and new ones arrive. At George and Lottie's British school, meanwhile, the flux is constant. The children of diplomats, World Bank or IMF officials come and go like passing fads. George has lost his four best friends in the past two years. One is in Nigeria, another in Pakistan and two have returned to the UK. He has become very good at making new friends, but one of his first questions is: "How long are you staying?"
He can hardly blame his friends for their geographical promiscuity. Just 11, he has moved continents and country three times already. George was born in Hong Kong just after the last British colony was handed back to China. Amelia followed a year and a half later in the same fog-clad hospital on Victoria Peak, just before a devastating typhoon was due to hit. Lottie saw first light in a teaching hospital in Singapore, surrounded by 20 visiting medical students from mainland China, Thailand and the Philippines.
Alice started life in the sedate surroundings of Sibley hospital in Washington DC. Whether we like it or not, Alice has to have an American passport because she was born on American soil. The bad news is that she also has to have a social security number and will forever be woven into the wide and adhesive net of the US Internal Revenue Service. The good news is that she can run for president one day.
Their mother, Penny, is English and grew up within earshot of her extended family in London. Their father is German, the son of refugees who left Silesia before it became Poland and settled in West Germany. Like my children, I had an early taste of the nomadic lifestyle. I was 10 when my family left our home in a small village in the Black Forest and moved to London, where my father became a correspondent for German radio in 1972. Since then, as well as the US, Singapore and Hong Kong, I have lived in Israel, Germany (again) and Rome.
So our four children are benignly confused. "Where do we actually belong?" is a question often asked in our household. "Heathrow airport," one of the children once quipped.
As they get older, the question becomes more difficult and more important to answer.
My son supports Chelsea but has never seen Chelsea play at home. He wears the shirts, the hats and even the blue slippers, but he doesn't burn with the same visceral passion as a homegrown supporter. When the Queen made a state visit to America in 2007, his class from the British school formed a human pyramid of smiles and curtsies for the visiting royals and their presidential hosts. George shook hands with that other George (Bush) and with the Queen, but he was also heard asking who that "other man" was. Prince Philip smirked, the teacher gave him a ticking off, I was quietly proud.
Amelia deals with her multicultural upbringing in true chameleon fashion. She became so bored with being asked at her American school to pronounce the word "loo" or "water" that she just started to sound like her audience. With her American friends, she slips effortlessly into a perfect Washington twang. She puts her hand on her heart when she sings The Star-Spangled Banner. At home or among her British friends she sounds completely English. It is uncanny and a little freaky, but the division is sacred and Amelia insists on two birthday parties: one for her American friends and one for the others. She wants to blend in.
Lottie, seven, and Alice, five, still move effortlessly and unselfconsciously between different worlds. Although I have noticed that Alice speaks to her imaginary friends - she has about four - in increasingly American accents. She is clearly living her version of the American dream.
We have been enormously lucky to live our nomadic existence. When George complains about the peripatetic lifestyle, I remind him that he rode an elephant in Java when he was three. In an age when our children can travel the world with the click of a mouse, how wonderful to have been there, done that.
I firmly believe that the happiest nomads are those who know where they are heading and when. Diplomats move around far more than foreign correspondents. There is a brutal clockwork to their travels: three years in a posting, then three years in London, followed by another posting. No extensions, few exceptions. It is ruthless but predictable. The itinerary of a foreign correspondent is more woolly and indulgent, but also more difficult to explain to children. Ultimately, it all comes down to mum and dad's whim. There is something escapist about expat life. You are a permanent outsider - free to admire and complain, to bicker and to analyse, but also free to get up and go.
I felt a twinge of envy and admiration as I watched my American friends vote in the last election. We own our house in Washington. We have lived there for more than six years. It is the only place that most of our children remember living in. America is much kinder to Brits and other foreigners than we are to them. I was once let off a speeding fine in Louisiana by a cop who told me that he "loooved Brits, that we were their only friends in the war on terror and that he had a real soft spot for our prime minister, Johnny Major". That was in 2003.
Yet when we land at Dulles, a giant 1970s oyster of an airport, we are brusquely reminded of our status as non-resident aliens. "Actually, I do reside here, I pay American taxes, I own a small slice of your vast country and I am most definitely a creature of this planet," I once replied to a gruff Homeland Security official. His sense of humour was off duty. We also loved living in Singapore, but as a foreigner they gave me a mandatory Aids test lest I contaminate a state where chewing gum is still an offence.
Because of the combined demands of ageing parents and growing children, our next move will probably be back to the UK. Despite the miserable weather, the exorbitant petrol and the cramped housing, there is a lot to be said for returning to become a resident non-alien and planting one's toothbrush in a place called home. The father of the two young African-American girls going to the school at the end of our road is a good example. A son of Kansas and Kenya, Barack Obama was brought up in Hawaii and Indonesia. He understands the world, but he belongs in America.
Only in America by Matt Frei is published by Harper Perennial at £8.99. To order a copy for £8.99 with free UK p&p go to theguardian.com/bookshop or call 0870 836 0875