This year I learned that that one of my favourite literary worlds was in fact a real place, so armed with my superior sense of solar navigation and the map in the front of the book, I embarked on a pilgrimage to Watership Down. The land itself is owned by Andrew Lloyd Webber and it is so unassuming that without prior knowledge, one would never notice that they had stumbled upon the home of those famous rabbits.
This view affords a glimpse of the Hampshire environs through which Fiver and his followers trekked in search of a new home. The Downs were cold and I soon shivered in my thin clothes as I watched the underside of the trees breathe and whisper in the chill autumn wind.
An attempt to climb this tree resulted in being thrown to the ground (I hadn't asked him for permission). When I tumbled to the ground, I landed on barbed wire which ripped a Harry-Potter-scar-shaped cut into my hand. Apparently you can only catch tetanus if the metal is rusty. Clean barbed wire is fine.
Even Nuthanger Farm was exactly where it should be. I could have hiked to find the Warren of the Shining Wire and Efrafa, but my time was short. As the afternoon grew darker, woodsmoke from the cottage chimneys mingled hypnotically with the musky smells of the green countryside and I had to force myself to speed onward in order to catch my bus from Kingsclere.
I saw no rabbits that day, although... as I drifted into well-earned rest, in that dreamy world between waking and sleeping, a recollection of the afternoon returned to me as though my memories had been obscured. I had been lying on the ground on Watership Down and the woods were full of movement; I thought I saw a squirrel although nothing was there. I turned around to something in the corner of my eye but it was just a falling leaf. When I looked back, a rabbit sat before me. He waved his paw in front of my face and said, "These are not the rabbits you are looking for."
Then sleep claimed me fully and I fell into dreams about bright eyes, burning like fire...
This beautiful big spider started building a web in my window recently. He was a little too large for comfort, so I put him in the back yard. Two days later I came home late at night to find that he had climbed back up two stories to my wide-open window and was building a large circular web. At that point I didn't have the heart to destroy his work and I respect the effort so much that I simply layered up for the night and left the window open. He stayed there for two days before I escorted him to the FAR end of the back yard this time.
As part of my literary pilgrimage series, I visited Oxford recently and hunted down the grave of C.S. Lewis. It turned out to be an unassuming marker in the churchyard of Holy Trinity in Headington on the city's outskirts. Nearby I also visited his house and the forest reserve through which he would wander when dreaming up his Narnia stories.
Having forgotten about Daylight Savings on the Sunday morning, I got up an hour earlier than I realised and wandered about in solitude through the Oxford University Botanic Gardens.
At the far end of the Gardens I took a seat in the chill morning shade and had a look over my map. To my great surprise, I discovered that I was sitting on Will & Lyra's seat: the very spot where the main characters of Pullman's Dark Materials promised to meet on Midsummers Day. I rippled with goosebumps when I realised. A little red-breasted robin flew up to me and said hello while I sit - I'm sure he was dying to say something. 
Naturally, no trip was complete without paying my respects to the aesthetically pleasing dead. The St Sepulchre's Graveyard was overgrown and rambling, full of memories and ghosts. 
The previous fortnight I spent in the hitherto unexplored land of Slovakia with a fellow adventurer.. I flew into Bratislava and wandered around on buses until I reached the village of Svätý Anton, nestled in the hills of the country's heart. We stayed several nights in an ancient cottage that had its own well, no indoor plumbing and a sloping lawn full of musical grasshoppers. In the attic I found a chest of newspapers dating back through the communist era of Czechoslovakia and even before World War II.
We climbed the forests and lakes of Banská Štiavnica, wandered around Banská Bystrica and made our way eventually to Beňadiková near Liptovský Mikuláš.
From there, we journeyed to his hometown Štrbské pleso (above) and climbed Mount Rysy in the High Tatras. Although it was only 2500m high, I was quite dizzy by the time we reached the top to look over into the wilds of Poland.
I was wandering through the old town of Bratisalva and came upon a courtyard surrounded by the towering ruins of old brick buildings, hollowed out by years of neglect. Windows stared vacantly like the eyes of skulls and the doors gaped into rooms and cellars long abandoned by the living. How could I resist going in? 
Montreallers are brilliantly bilingual and they switch between French and English with ease. It really is a European city. Their independent sense of culture and identity is quite understandable. They are also really really really good looking. However, people are still people, and I was asked for a light by a man on the street who then commented, "You speak really nice English. Is it Shakespearean?" It would have taken too long to explain how deeply mistaken he was about (probably) so many things, so I just smiled and said, "Yes. Yes it is."
With the monument to C. S. Lewis:
I felt like a boy again, climbing up the sides of castle escarpments, monkeying up trees and skimming walnuts across the frozen pond to make that delightful metallic pinging sound. 
