Russell Hoban, 1925 - 2011.

As children, we used to read HOW TOM BEAT CAPTAIN NAJORK AND HIS HIRED SPORTSMEN obsessively and dream about jam-powered frogs.

As students, we used to pinch all the reading material from the bathrooms of friends' houses and leave instead copies of RIDDLEY WALKER, KLEINZEIT and FREMDER open on well-marked passages.

As adults, we used to leave the District Line at Parsons Green and walk to Fulham Broadway to continue our journey north on the off-chance that we might run into him walking on Eel Brook Common.

We papered the hall with THE LION OF BOAZ-JACHIN AND JACHIN-BOAZ - using two copies, so that you can read it round the walls.

Russell Hoban was the master. We are more for him, and less without him.

Breakfast (in November)...

"My problem," concludes Chris Stewart, eyeing the lengths of cane that he is weaving into a tangled wire fence to keep the sheep out of the vegetable patch, "is that I cannot do anything properly."

It has been nine years since I last set foot in El Valero, and Chris's thoughts were largely occupied with keeping the sheep out of the vegetables then too. Back then, Porca the parrot (of A PARROT IN A PEPPER TREE fame) was alive and in residence, and if you were unwise enough to set down your biro or toothbrush they would instantly rematerialise as part of the nest that he (the parrot) was endlessly building beneath the sink. Porca was El Valero in bird form: small, colourful, beautiful, chaotic, irrepressibly single-minded. Nine years ago, too, Chris was gamely tying up sticks and bits of wire to prevent the incursions of the sheep into the vegetables. Today, among the olives and oranges, in the warm November sunshine, he has added a rusty exhaust pipe and several further bits of wire to this never-ending construction, as well as the cane from the groves on the riverbank. Probably there are biros and toothbrushes in there too.

One of the many great things about DRIVING OVER LEMONS was that it was so obviously real. Chris and Ana had no thoughts of recounting their adventures to a couple of million book-buyers when they moved to their tiny farm in the Alpujarras 23 years ago. They moved here and, so far as I can tell, they have lived here ever since in very much the same spirit as Chris is now completing his delicate lattice of cane - which, being green, will very soon shrink and split, and in any case he promised Ana some time ago that he would build a gate here.

"Since there's no money in farming," he reflects, eyeing the cane with satisfaction, "I reckon that you might as well make it beautiful."

Of course, it would have been more sensible to have put a proper fence and a proper gate here 20 years ago and have done with it. It's true that Chris doesn't do this sort of thing properly, but he does do it with this irresistible delight - which looks a lot more like a purpose than any fence or gate I know.

To start with a picture, here is the cover of KONSTANTIN - or something very like it:

The news this week is that John Banville, no less, has given it his endorsement, which is obviously a glorious thing.

We - wife Charlie, son Edwyn and I - have been wandering around Europe for the past six weeks or so, so most other news has been distinctly unliterary. We crossed the Channel in early October in a fine blue camper van with stars up the side. We managed a night in a forlorn campsite between Dunkirk and Calais, then, the following day, the gearbox burst on the autoroute, sending a cloud of oil out the back, which tarnished the stars and left us stranded in a cheap hotel in the outskirts of a small town in the Somme for the better part of a week. This was not altogether what we had had in mind. And museums in which rifles, helmets, grenades etc are displayed uncovered at ground level are not ideally suited to 2-year-old boys.

In any case, Charlie bravely returned to Brecon to fetch our very small car, and the Grand Tour continued on a less grand scale: the Alps, followed by a couple of weeks in the radiant forests of Liguria, a few days in Rome with the inestimable Oshry Chageg (inspiration, incidentally, for Paolo in A) and a ferry to Catalunya, where we find ourselves now. Knowing the Costa Brava principally from my grandparents' collection of 1970s Giles cartoons, I am pleasantly amazed. Even Salvador Dali, whose moustaches droop heavy over these parts, turns out to be a much more interesting artist than I'd realised.

There should be an organisation whereby people - writers and other such hard-pressed types - could rent, for some token amount, a few neighbouring apartments among these multitudes of towns and resorts abandoned five months out of the year. We have been walking the cliffs and swimming in the sea almost every day this week, and the season ended, what, nearly two months ago.

Between the swimming and the struggles with Catalan, we have been reading like readers who find it difficult to read when they are writing, which is most of the time. I have managed to finish "The Red Waste" - a story set in Radnorshire in the Late Bronze Age, when the average temperature dipped by about two degrees and the people of the uninhabitable hills were forced down into the valleys. (THE EYE'S HORIZON - an anthology of stories relating to climate change - will be published next summer and promises to be fascinating, if possibly bleak in places.) But otherwise, everything from Homer to Arthur Machen to Mohsin Hamid has passed before my eyes, and I recommend the experience highly. I have to give a particular nod to Francis Spufford's RED PLENTY, which I had been waiting to read until I finished KONSTANTIN. He remains as wise and uninhibited as ever.

This weekend we continue to the Alpujarras and a sojourn with Chris and Ana Stewart. It would plainly be wrong not to write about them too.

Considering how much I enthuse about Radnorshire, I don't get to read there very often. So, to make a pleasant change, I'll be reading things new and old as part of the Summer of Great Events at Erwood Station this Friday 19th August at 2 pm. As an additional attraction, Edwyn Bullough will be in support. He has recently learnt to walk and guarantees refreshing levels of chaos.

Since the inestimable Stephen Hoper has now updated this website, the entry below will no longer do and I'll have to write something else.

It is Hay Festival this week, as anyone within 20 miles will not have failed to notice. The Wye Valley is a car park, but the sun is out and the literature of Wales is admirably represented - yesterday by Iain Sinclair, whose Gwyn Jones lecture considered the borders of the map and of the mind. Horatio Clare has written beautifully about it on his Literature Wales blog, and I would only add that Mr Sinclair's frequent enthusiastic references to Arthur Machen are yet more evidence of the great man's renaissance. THE HILL OF DREAMS was reprinted recently by The Library of Wales, and with the 150th anniversary of Machen's birth in 2013 bringing events and celebrations to Newport and Caerleon I can only urge everyone to read it. He is the best writer of the Welsh border.

So, my thanks to Tiffany Murray, John Gimlette and Ruth Padel for a thoroughly enjoyable OX-TRAVELS session yesterday evening. OX-TRAVELS, of course, is a new anthology of travel writing benefiting Oxfam. With contributions by everyone from Patrick Leigh Fermor to Colin Thubron and my own fair brother Oliver, it is as good as it is good. All must buy a copy.

Please note. Tomorrow morning (June 3rd), Peter Conradi, Brenda Maddox and I will be discussing the literature of Radnorshire at 10 am, delving back into the matter of borders. An early-ish start, but think, a nice long day of strawberries and sunshine ahead of you. And Radnorshire right there to boot.