The presentation went well - the place was 'packed' (a relative term - it wasn't that big a room) and the organisers said I'd beaten their previous attendance figure record by two!

Patrick Leight-Fermor was very much of his era and that does come across in the trilogy. I discovered him, not for those books, but for one he'd written in the 50's about traveller hospitality in monasteries. In it he'd essentially walk up the front door, knock, and ask if they'd put him up. It was a set book on my writing MA so I'd no choice but to read it, but what came across for me was not so much the monastic life insights he related but the confidence and near certainty in the outcome he had to do it in the first place. That's very much in evidence in the walking trilogy.

I almost gave up on him about ten pages into the first book because of his very much out of fashion these days 'public school' attitude, but I'm glad I persevered as, on the upside, some of the stuff is a masterclass in descriptive writing. And as he's writing about pre war Europe at essentially grass roots level it is a fascinating read. There's little of the quest for a fairer world that you get with Laurie Lee or George Orwell as they head for Spain, it's a journey almost without a point other than, in mountaineering terms, 'because it's there'. The nearest I've found in modern writing is Nicholas Crane's Clear Waters Rising, where he also walks to Istanbul but from a starting point in north west Spain.