If Brits, as Sriskandarajah says, do have a wider view of the world, then cheap travel and improved communications make abroad not as foreign as it used to be and emigrating less daunting.

In fact, for many middle-class families across the world, living abroad is a rite of passage, whether it is gap-year students digging wells in African villages, high-flyers studying for MBAs or investment bankers accepting foreign postings.

Dr Sam Scott, a lecturer in social geography at Liverpool University who has researched European migration, suggests the experience of foreign living and culture is a social aspiration and may be a way some families give themselves a mark of cultural sophistication. He says: "People's social and cultural experiences abroad are useful as a form of class 'capital'. It's about how you change as a person and the networks you enter that set you out as different."

The pursuit of this badge of distinction increases the likelihood of accidental migration, which takes place when the intention to return home is re-routed by, say, romance. Prof Hammerton suggests growing numbers of accidental migrants are making redundant the distinction of permanent migrants and short-term expats living overseas on a work posting.

How, for example, to define Ian Corfield? He is a 35-year-old chief executive of Bank West's retail division, who moved with his wife and two young children from central London to Perth after HBOS, which owns Bank West, offered him the post. "We always wanted to live and work abroad. We weren't sick of Britain; we just wanted to experience a different environment and culture," he says.

For the moment they're keeping their London house but think they might sell up and make Australia their permanent home, thereby blurring the demarcation between expat and migrant.

I ask Paul Beasley, editor of Emigrate, a magazine offering migration news and advice, why so many Britons want to leave. He says unemployment is not an issue but taxes and house prices motivate people to up sticks. "The property market is a big factor; they want their children to be able to get a foot on the property ladder. There is a dream, buoyed by the strong pound, that people can buy their houses outright abroad and have a nest egg."

Indeed, everyone I speak to at the fair raises the issue. At one stand, I ask what I could buy if I sold my one-bed London flat. "You could get a 3,000 square feet, four-bedroom house on an acre of land and three-car garage - a mini-mansion if you moved to Saskatoon," the Canadian consultant enthuses proudly.

Foreign homes allow us to experiment with migration. A survey by Barclays bank showed that 35 per cent of people buying a holiday home planned to relocate or retire there. David Bloor, a 49-year-old maths teacher from east Yorkshire, says that buying a property in Turkey has given him a taste for life abroad and now he hopes to settle farther away. Some commentators dub the fashion for buying overseas homes "pre-emigrating".

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