I’m thinking of those locations (usually, but not exclusively, interiors) in your favorite fiction that you love, that you’d love to hang out in IRL, that you look forward to the characters being there. To quote Liz Lemon (30Rock), “I want to go to that place.”
For example, I love the kitchen in the presbytery in the Father Brown series. It has a big table that almost fills the room. It’s covered with a checked cloth, and the principals usually gather around it to plan how to solve the latest murder. There’s tea of course, in a green tea service that I sometimes see in other British shows. Mrs. McCarthy’s award-winning strawberry scones are piled on a plate-- and you can have more than one! Cozy, 1950s appliances line the walls-- the color is sort of a muted apple green. Most kitchens in British shows of this era have a large metal box with “BREAD”*
stenciled on the front somewhere on the counter. I have one that I paid waaaay too much for in an antique shop. I keep my supply of Keurig cups in it, not bread. There’s often an Aga, the Rolls Royce of kitchen ranges-- you can buy one today. They cost as much as a car and probably weigh as much, too.
Another place I love is Perry Mason’s office in the 1950s CBS TV series. The decor is mid-century office, nothing cozy about it. But that’s got to be the safest place on earth. When you’re in his office, you can be sure that he will rescue from murder charges and straighten everything out in your life. Of course, you have to be innocent, but his clients always are. I especially love the end of the episode when Perry, Della, and Paul gather around the table and eat sandwiches from a piled up plate that Della has brought in from somewhere. If I could just move into that office, nothing bad would ever happen to me.
I might add some more places as I think of them. What are yours?
Hehe. Now THAT’S the way to do an inline picture. Just make sure the URL is on a line entirely by itself. This new board has some very cool features!*
The book (and later the series) Tales of the City by Armisted Maupin was wonderfully liberating, and I went on to read all the books and listen to Maupin himself read them.
Mary Ann flees Cleveland for San Francisco. She climbs a long wooden staircase…
… and discovers Barbary Lane, a little piece of jungle in the middle of the city, leading to a wonderful house.
Well, one day I had a flight cancelled, so I found myself with a free day in San Francisco. So I walked through seven different neighborhoods and finally found the staircase! And it did indeed lead to a narrow path of primeval ferns and wild gardens.
To this day, it’s one of my fondest memories.
…
“I travelled 5000 miles to make a pilgrimage to a place that isn’t real. The mythical Barbary Lane is more of a state of mind than an actual place…”
I love James Herriots Yorkshire.
It seems like a perfect pastoral place. I’d love to see it for real.
I love Victorian London. Sherlock and Watson in Baker St.
I love any movie about staging plays or Ballets. Backstage is a wondrous place no matter how amateur the production is.
New Iberia, LA, as portrayed in James Lee Burke’s Robicheaux books. I got a chance to stop there last year on a drive from New Orleans to Houston and was happy to see that much of the charm that comes through the often gritty novels was present.
In Wayne Manor, in the Tim Burton Batman movies, there was a . . . living room? dining room? drawing room? salon? . . . that had an absurdly large fireplace, with an elaborately-carved stone mantelpiece. That would have been a great place to host a D&D game.
Robin’s Nest, in Magnum, P.I. (Assuming, of course, that I had the money for maintenance.)
The witches’ house in Charmed. If three people could live there comfortably, I could live there luxuriously.
Inside the hollow tree where Tumnus the Faun lives in C.S. Lewis’s The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe. The context of the scene is not benign, as Tumnus is setting Lucy up to be captured by the Witch. If you can overlook that, the scene is the epitome of coziness.
The Lake District - The Swallows and Amazons series of books
I have often been asked how I came to write Swallows and Amazons.
The answer is that it had its beginning long, long ago when, as children, my brother, my sisters and I spent most of our holidays on a farm at the south end of Coniston. We played in or on the lake or on the hills above it, finding friends in the farmers and shepherds and charcoal-burners whose smoke rose from the coppice woods along the shore.
We adored the place. Coming to it, we used to run down to the lake, dip our hands in and wish, as if we had just seen the new moon. Going away from it, we were half drowned in tears. While away from it, as children and as grown-ups, we dreamt about it.
No matter where I was, wandering about the world, I used at night to look for the North Star and, in my mind’s eye, could see the beloved skyline of great hills beneath it.
Swallows and Amazons grew out of those old memories. I could not help writing it. It almost wrote itself.
I love the terrifying yet beautiful Maine towns created by Stephen King. Derry, Castle Rock, Jerusalems Lot. I have never lived in an area that has snow nor 4 seasons. Id like to give it a try…if I live long enough.
Seconding Robin’s Nest. We’re whiter than white, so any place on Hawai’i would have to be heavily shaded. IIRC, about half of Robin’s estate had massive trees.
Not Callahan’s. Not even before it turned into a radioactive hole in the ground. Not even Mary’s Place. Those are both located on one of the Circles of Hell. But maybe The Place.
XXXX sounds kinda nice, now that Rincewind brought back The Wet.
Three Pines, Quebec – the center of many of Louise Penny’s wonderful mysteries. There’s a restaurant that serves delicious meals and where all the tiny town’s wonderfully eccentric residents meet for a cognac by the fireplace. There’s also a book store.
I love, love Pickax, in Moose county, Mich. In Lilian Jackson Braun novels, ‘The Cat Who…’ series.
Of course I like them because they are about Siamese cats their antics and their owner Qwilleran. He’s a former newspaper man from Chicago and mysteries just fall at his feet.
The Siamese help him solve them.
Easy and mindless books to read. Light entertainment.
Even better than reading is listening to George Guidell read them… he IS James McIntosh Qwilleran.
BUT, keep in mind, you might not like Pickax in the winter. In the book I’m listening to now, the whole town’s worried that it won’t stay below 0ºF all winter. The snowblower sales are down, and the spring crops need the snow melt in the spring.
It is Four Hundred Miles North of Everywhere, after all…
