Something I enjoyed as a child was to visit the houses of authors I'd read, or had heard of - the Bronte sisters, Jane Austen, Thomas Hardy, Rudyard Kipling, Agatha Christie, Daphne du Maurier.
There was something rather wonderful about seeing where they sat and wrote, the views they enjoyed, the domesticity that surrounded them. It felt that I was gaining an insight into their creativity, their inspiration and it made them more real, and their achievement a little more attainable for me, too. It fuelled my ambition to be a writer.
So what would it be like, then, to own and live in a house that was once that of a famous, a successful author?
I've been pondering that possibility with the news of two houses which have been put on the market recently. Of course they are not places I would seriously choose to live in but the fact that they have been made available has caused me to wonder, to imagine.
The bestselling novelist John Le Carre's house on the clifftop in Cornwall and the author and environmentalist Roger Deakin's house in Suffolk have both come up for sale.
I've enjoyed dwelling on the pictures of the rooms, the gardens, the shelves of books - but I wonder what will happen to them. Will a zealous fan snap them up for the ultimate connection to their much-loved author? Will they be saved for posterity and opened for public viewings? Or will they be seen solely as bricks and mortar to be shaped and moulded to the current owners' preferences?
Thank you for reading.