Every explorer feels regret after the elation of discovery. Captain Cooke’s diaries are full of sadness as well as wonder, as the unknown world becomes the known. Mallory, writing to his wife about the challenge of Everest, acknowledged the absurdity, as well as the sublime lure, of a mountain top ‘the size of a billiard table.’

John Donne neatly escaped the folding world by mapping America onto his mistress’s body –‘my America, my new-found land.’ You could read this as the conquering or colonising of the female, but that would be too dull. It is both a recognition of the body as the true centre of the world, and a very modern apprehension that the end of all our exploring brings us back to where we started from, (thanks, TS Eliot), - which is, of course, ourselves.

It isn’t surprising that the Victorians, who were obsessed with colouring the globe pink, and producing maps precise enough to spot a goat track in the Himalayas, should also be obsessed with the idea of Home. That an Englishman’s home is his castle, has been used, variously, to market the suburbs, sell-off Council houses, justify new towns, and explain the rise and rise of property values.

Home, to the English, certainly has a particular feel and a complex set of values surrounding it. In Italian, for instance, there is no word for ‘home’. There is La casa, the house, and La famiglia, the family. Home, as such doesn’t exist.

But if the Englishman’s home has provided security, prosperity, aspiration, the Englishman’s other home is all about dreaming. We long to scramble out of the flat or the semi, off the crowded roads, and into the tranquil country cot. An increasing number of us are buying abroad, and for most this has nothing to do with investment; it is a measure of dreaming space that we seek.

Matthew Parris’s charming new book, A Castle in Spain – a mountain ruin and an impossible dream, tells us everything in the title. The four key words – castle, mountain, ruin, dream, sum up the modern longing to escape the boxed-in nightmare landscapes we have faithfully copied from Piranesi, in the name of progress.

Our reduced global condition, that sends (male) scientists into rhapsodies about space colonies, overlooks the fact the Earth is our home, and that we need it to be more poetic than its current urban mix of motorways and high rises jammed together with a few balding parks left to graffiti and litter.

The mind needs to dream. The body needs space –physical and imaginative. When I look over a mountain range, I do not need to climb it, but I need to know it is there in case I want to climb it. My mind climbs it; I push myself through narrow passes, meet bandits, drink from waterfalls. These are daydreams that refresh me, and through them, cut the solid objects of poems and music – the things we make out of our daydreaming, the stuff that can’t be measured by GDP. The stuff that keeps us sane – or just as importantly, means that we don’t give way to despair.

I have bought a couple of ruins myself in my time, and will probably do it again. The strange thing about a ruin, especially one in a wonderful landscape, is that it exists as everything except a ruin. Children can dream a castle out of a cardboard box and a jam jar; adults can make multiple worlds out of the fallen stones and rotted boards of an old house.

It is getting harder to find these abandoned places, and our desire for them uncovers the fact that they are more than stones, they are touchstones. These dreaming houses feel like a place to be well; no one can be well in a world that continually sacrifices the imaginative and the magical for the costed and the mundane.

Which brings us back to books – as you knew it would. Books, are not luxuries. In a squeezed and shrinking world – like one of those awful rooms out of Poe, that squashes you to death, books don’t just line the walls, they stop them closing in.

Our circumstances may be reduced, but why should we reduce our minds? If market necessities rule our daily lives, why should they rule our spirits?

Home has always been a place to come back to. The other home is a place to escape to. The great thing about books is that they are both.

September 24th 2005