The closest most of us get to our favourite authors is reading their books. But some people insist on stalking their idols to their front doors ... and beyond. Alan Taylor explores our fascination with the homes of the famous, while Rob Fletcher and Ajay Close recount their experiences of living with literary ghosts

AS the proliferation of property programmes illustrates, our appetite for looking at other people's houses is insatiable. Show me a lighted basement window and I will show you an unmissable opportunity, a temptation too far. Open a door and watch the crowds file in. Nor need one necessarily be interested in buying. According to estate agents, some people regard viewing houses as a treat or a hobby, like collecting Munros or rare butterflies. Such folk are simply nosey, practising legitimately what burglars do criminally. It is a harmless form of addiction, the only victims being the hapless sellers of a house invaded by people with empty pockets.

One of the joys of journalism is the opportunity to gain bona fide access to the homes of famous people, in my case mainly writers. Often, of course, a writer will not want to be interviewed in his house, which is understandable. Journalists by nature are curious creatures with impeccable taste who are apt to ridicule lesser beings who fail to match their own lofty standards. I've lost count of the number of interviews I've read in which a Nobel or a Booker winner is derided because he or she shops at Sofas R Us for their soft furnishings. Apparently, Monica Ali, of Brick Lane fame, no longer allows journalists into her home since one of them damned it as irredeemably suburban. And who can blame her?

The first writer's threshold I was allowed to cross was Norman MacCaig's. That was back in the Palaeolithic age when the pubs shut at 10pm. MacCaig, who lived in Edinburgh's Leamington Terrace, used kindly to invite various odds and sods to extend the evening. His was a Victorian, high-ceilinged flat in which he and his wife Isabel had brought up their two children. While Norman sat by the fireside in the living-room, Isabel remained in the scullery, making sandwiches, doing a crossword and chatting to whoever dropped by. Above her hung a pulley festooned with damp clothes. On one wall in the living-room was a bookcase filled mainly with anorexic volumes of poetry. Mischievously, Norman claimed he never read novels. The table at which he wrote was at the bay window. "One fag for a short poem," he replied, when asked how long it took him to write. "Two fags for a long one." Even for those reekie days he smoked a lot. What he'd make of the smoking ban heaven alone knows.

It soon became obvious, as I ventured further afield, that Scottish writers lived in less commodious circumstances than their peers elsewhere, especially in London and America. A few days after Clinton was elected, I travelled to Boston to meet John Updike. Originally, we were to have met at the St Botolph Club on Commonwealth Avenue but heavy snow made him reluctant to leave his base in Beverley Springs in Massachusetts. Would I mind awfully going to him?

There was, though, one proviso: I must agree not to describe the location of his house or detail its contents. His wife, he said, who was away, would go bananas if she knew he'd allowed a journalist into their home. I got the impression that Mrs U regarded journalists as she might an infestation of dry rot. I gave Updike my word. I needn't really have bothered.

The house, built on a bluff overlooking the ocean, seemed devoid of personality. The kitchen was so clean you could have operated in it. Still, at least I will be able to tell my grandchildren that the man who created Harry "Rabbit" Angstrom once made me a cup of herbal tea.

The first writer's house in which I stayed was that of Muriel Spark, who was then - in the early 1990s - living in Tuscany near Arezzo, where I had initially met and interviewed her. Through her friend Penelope Jardine, who owned the 14th-century rectory in which they both lived, she invited my family and I to spend the best part of a month to house-sit while they went on holiday.

It was August and dizzyingly hot. While my wife and I, accompanied by Penelope, went to a nearby supermarket to stock up on provisions, Muriel said she would keep an eye the children, both of whom were under 10. No sooner were we gone than my son climbed into an old well in the garden and was unable to find a way out. My daughter raised the alarm and Muriel, then about 70, calmly talked him out of his predicament.

She and Penelope departed the next day and we were left to manage and deal with the menagerie of cats and dogs. Muriel kept her part of the house locked but the rest was open, full of books and paintings and records. Before leaving, she had given the kids two notebooks, one marked "Secret", the other "Mystery", in which to keep a record of their stay. "Make sure," she told them, "you keep them well hidden when passing back through Customs."

The laureate of house-sitting is Alastair Reid, the Gallovidian itinerant, who once wrote an essay on the subject for the New Yorker. "I have a stern morality about occupying other people's houses," he wrote. "I feel they have to be left in better shape than I find them, and this may mean fixing faucets or supplying anything missing, from light bulbs to balloons." Having recently sojourned in the bijou apartment in Greenwich Village which Alastair shares with his partner, Leslie, I confess to not knowing whether any balloons were missing when we arrived. I certainly didn't replace any if there were. What I can say is that thanks to Alastair - and Leslie - I have now seen the movie The Big Lebowski, which, it seems, I am the only person on the planet not to have seen already, read Christina Stead's terrific novel Letty Fox, and know that if you're looking for a bargain, Housing Works, one of the relatively few charity shops in New York, is definitely the place to go.

The house where Nineteen Eighty-Four was conceived has become an unlikely attraction for Orwell fans. Spare a thought, though, for the owners trying to enjoy some peace and quiet there.

By Rob Fletcher

WHEN, 60 years ago, Eric Blair emerged from my grandparents' battered old lorry at the remote Hebridean cottage he was to call home, my grandmother drove off feeling greatly concerned for the tall, sallow-faced man. She knew he was a writer, but could not have anticipated the significance the author's devotees would later attach to his time spent in this isolated outpost, on the northern tip of the island of Jura. Here, under his nom de plume George Orwell, he would produce Nineteen Eighty-Four.

Seeking seclusion, the ailing - by now tubercular - author had learned from Observer editor David Astor, a Jura landowner, of a vacant farmhouse owned by my grandparents, Robin and Margaret Fletcher. Astor's description of the island appealed to Orwell, but the author had to wait. My grandfather, who'd been serving with the Gordon Highlanders at the fall of Singapore, had last been heard of in a prisoner of war camp in Burma and the War Office had received an unconfirmed report of his death through torture in 1943. When contacted by Astor about having Blair as a possible new tenant, my grandmother was unwilling to make any arrangements - she was waiting until she knew her husband's fate before deciding whether she would remain on Jura.

The war in Europe ended, followed by the war in the East, and the surviving soldiers began to return to the island. However, it was not until three weeks after the war had ended that my grandmother received any news - miraculously, her husband had survived his Burmese ordeal. On his return to Britain, my grandfather visited Blair in London and described the difficulties life at Barnhill would entail. Undeterred, Blair made the arduous journey north, completing the final stage of his travels in my grandparents' aforementioned truck.

Blair was to live in Barnhill for the best part of two years - until the winter of 1948, when ill health forced him into a Glasgow sanatorium. The book that was written during his sojourn on the island has inspired Orwell aficionados to visit ever since.

Of all this I was largely ignorant until, at the age of 10, my parents took over the running of Barnhill and the barrenly beautiful land around it. Since Orwell's time it had seen few year-round residents and so suffered from pervasive west coast damp. Yet, after initial misgivings about its somewhat shabby interior, it became a much-loved holiday destination for me, my brother and our friends. Barnhill provided the perfect base from which to fish, swim and explore the natural wonders of this remarkable Hebridean island. However, at a time in life when dystopia was far from our minds, the significance of Orwell and his book were largely lost on my contemporaries. As far as we were concerned the writer, to judge from the pictures that adorned the walls, was rather an anaemic, gaunt and cheerless being. More of a bogeyman than a hero, the author inspired a friend to claim that the sickly amorphous mass spotted floating in one of the water bowsers outside must be none other than "Orway's brain".

As the years progressed and we worked through his concise, objective, no-nonsense prose, my friends and I became increasingly impressed with Orwell: a man who'd shot an elephant and become disillusioned with the British Empire; sampled depression-era poverty and shared dog-end roll ups with tramps; and had been wounded by a fascist bullet in Spain.

The writer's stay at Barnhill, sadly his life's penultimate chapter, must have been rather tame in comparison. Moreover, as my grandfather had warned, merely attempting to exist in this isolated part of the world was no mean feat. Consequently, we felt a certain pride to share - albeit for shorter periods - many of the day-to-day struggles that Orwell must have faced.

The house and its setting have changed little since his day. Although it now boasts limited electricity, supplied by an ancient generator that appears more muscle-bound beast than man-made machine, a coal-fired Rayburn heats the tea-coloured water for the bath that the writer himself once soaked in, and there is neither telephone nor television. Perhaps even more remarkably in our rapidly shrinking world, Barnhill's isolation has remained intact. Part of the location's appeal for Orwell was that it was "un-get-at-able" and today the road linking the house to the rest of the island remains pothole-strewn and bisected by rushes. To reach the settlement of Craighouse (home to the shop and the pub) takes almost two hours, despite being a mere 25-mile drive.

To the north is one further farmhouse, Kinauchdrach, beyond which lies the whirlpool. To the south, the nearest dwelling is over five miles distant; to the east is the sea; to the west stretches the tawny tussocky tundra that is characteristic of the island, interrupted by the occasional peaty lochan, and rare clusters of stunted birch.

At Barnhill you feel utterly unscrutinised: after a few days without seeing a soul, you can begin to believe, to borrow Orwell's working title for Nineteen Eighty-Four, that you really are The Last Man In Europe.

Orwell's brief presence at Barnhill attracts visitors from across the globe. Occasionally, these ambassadors of the outside world provide a charming interlude from isolation - such as the Japanese academic who appeared to view the house of the "venerable Orwell", wearing only a tailcoat, despite walking to the house through a classic west coast storm. Yet more often than not they have a tendency to shatter the precious illusion of living in a land that time forgot.

While most visitors are well-meaning, many seem lacking in the common courtesy, decency and gentleness that Orwell repeatedly extolled as virtues inherent in the British people. Perspiring faces can be pressed against windows while guests try to eat their cornflakes in peace. And, not infrequently, intrusive Orwellites are discovered, unbidden, wandering around inside the house. Perhaps they are unaware Orwell once noted that, in Britain, to be called a "nosey parker" was a very grave insult - and that the author believed this respect for privacy would act as bulwark against state intrusion and the establishment of the secret police in his native land.

Perhaps this noseyness reflects less on the character of the pilgrims than on the situation of the cottage. Even back in 1948, Orwell's sister, Avril Blair - who helped look after the house, the author and his infant son - complained of yachtsmen and hikers occasionally calling on Barnhill "as if it was a public house".

These days it seems that resentment generated by travelling five miles of rough track on foot can boil over when the Orwellites finally reach their destination. There is no plaque to declare it was once his abode, nowhere to purchase an Orwell T-shirt as a trophy of their trek, nor even to buy a cup of tea.

As a part-time "curator", I have often been found guilty of failing to enhance the Orwell ambience. A New York Times writer, who visited just after my 18th birthday celebrations, chastised me and my guests for having left the house a mess and our beds unmade - despite the fact we'd had the courtesy to show the unannounced and rather unpleasant American around. Another journalist, seeking to illustrate the isolation of the place, quoted my father as asking hopefully for some spare cigarettes an interesting read for my mother, who believed he'd given up "the foul habit" months before.

Although Orwell himself suffered his fair share of distractions and disturbances while on Jura, I don't believe he was ever berated in the media for keeping his bedroom in a state of disarray. Despite Barnhill's distance from Bloomsbury, he regularly had to dissuade his London literary acquaintances from visiting and, if any did manage the trek, Avril generally made them feel less than at home.

However, Bill Dunn, a crofter and Orwell's nearest neighbour, took a shine to Avril and would apparently serenade her across the hillside with the skirl of the pipes. Although the one-legged Dunn helped the writer in his attempts to improve the peaty Barnhill soil, whether he improved the author's concentration is open to debate. While, to a certain extent, Orwell resented Dunn's presence, his sister's suitor played a crucial role in allowing the author to stay on the island, at a time when the dying Orwell needed all his strength just to sit up in bed, typing the final drafts of his magnum opus.

Today, a more contemporary literary legend is abroad on Jura. The recipient of a Scottish Book Trust writers' award, Will Self has, like Orwell, conceived a dystopian future (in the pages of his last novel, The Book Of Dave). Like Orwell, he also has something of a cadaverous expression, which might make infants ill at ease. Indeed, while the spectre of Orwell-in-oilskins used to terrify the toddlers when he appeared at my grandmother's house, I'd imagine the apparition of a cagoule-clad Will Self, looming out of a dreich Jura evening, could have a similar effect on the island's children of today.

Illness trapped William Soutar, Perth's critically acclaimed poet, in bed as life slowly left him, but author Ajay Close still feels his presence in the house she now calls home

I FIRST met the man whose home I share when we'd been co-habiting for several weeks. I knew about him, of course: his poetry, his passion for the Scots language, his crippling illness and early death. I'd seen the two portraits of him: one as a watchful youth with choirboy good looks, the other as a middle-aged savant bloated by years in bed. But he wasn't quite real to me until the day I opened The New Gresham English Dictionary and found every word on the page checked off with a tiny black tick. I turned to the next page, and the next: he had read the dictionary from cover to cover. On page 841 I found the inscription "completed my survey of this rather poor dictionary today, Dec 14th 1933. William Soutar". It had taken him 12 years.

Deciphering that spiky, painfully miniscule handwriting, I began to understand what it means to spend nearly a third of a lifetime in bed. The endless days. The visitors he couldn't escape (and felt guilty for wanting to). The frustration of the invalid life. The mocking answer to a poet's prayer: plenty of time to write and next to nothing to write about. Four walls, the changing seasons viewed through a suburban window, bittersweet memories of vigorous youth. I use a different dictionary these days. I can't bear to look at those black ticks.

The term "writer-in-residence" is a bit of a fiction: mostly incumbents reside in their own homes. Unusually, the William Soutar fellowship comes with a three-bedroom semi-detached house in the douce Craigie district of Perth. The Soutar House was donated to the city by John Soutar as a permanent memorial to his poet son. All Soutar's books are kept here and, while the family possessions are long gone, there is a suitably old-fashioned feel to the replacement furniture. I am a guest in someone else's house. It just so happens that my host has been dead for 64 years.

It's a daunting responsibility, being the channel between a critically acclaimed but, to most Scots, unknown poet and the 21st century world. All the more daunting, when so many people feel such a personal investment in him. To the citizens of Perth, Soutar is a local lad: son of John Soutar who had the joiners' yard on Mill Street, an alumnus of Perth Academy who mapped their streets in verse. To Alexander Scott, his biographer, he was an exemplar of courage, bearing a cruel illness with fortitude and humour. To the Scots language lobby he's a patriot whose delightful bairn rhymes have re-introduced generations of children to their linguistic heritage. To some academics he's a peerless diarist; to others, a master of the short lyric. To his friend and literary rival Hugh MacDiarmid he was a minor poet whose work was, nevertheless, threatening enough for MacDiarmid to omit many now highly-regarded poems from the posthumous collection he was commissioned to edit.

And to me? He's the fleshy man in James Gilchrist's portrait: that shock of dark hair rising above his domed forehead, those full lips betraying him as a sensualist and a flirt but a thwarted sensualist, a fettered flirt, still living under his parents' roof, his desires only realised in his dreams. There is disdain, too, in the set of that mouth, the droop of the eyelids: he suffered fools, but not gladly. (Despite rejecting his Calvinist upbringing, he was forever marked by its moral seriousness.) A bit of a peacock, dressing daily in starched shirt, bow tie and pyjama bottoms, but with a streak of subversive humour he was ever ready to turn against himself. An ambitious man, determined to make his mark in the world he was physically unable to enter, but prey to the corrosive depression of the chronic invalid. As he wrote in his diary: "I can but blame some fatal flaw in my self's self for the humiliation of a fine body."

Would I have liked him? Undoubtedly I would have been charmed by him. He would have made me laugh. Listening to him reading his poetry, I would have been spellbound. But I'm not sure I would have wanted to spend too much time around him, just as I can't bear to see the terrible thwarted energy of those ticks in the dictionary margins. Even now, separated from him by 64 years, I find him an uneasy house-mate.

Number 27 Wilson Street was built by John Soutar in 1924. The oak panelling, stained glass windows, ceramic fire surrounds and exquisitely-crafted bookcases betray the influence of William Morris and the arts and crafts movement, but there's a sober, Presbyterian quality to the house, too: its solidity at once comfortable and just faintly oppressive. Nowhere is this atmosphere more evident than in Willie's room: a long panelled chamber with a window looking out to the back garden. When the novelist Candia McWilliam first entered it she remarked: "It feels as if I'll never get out."

Here in 1930, having been diagnosed as suffering from ankylosing spondylitis, an arthritis of the spine, Soutar took to his bed, never to get up again. In the corners of the room either side of the window are two angled mirrors installed by John Soutar to widen his son's field of vision as he became increasingly immobile, able to do little more than read, write, feed himself and smoke. Here David Low, Soutar's GP and lifelong friend, told him that he had developed tuberculosis. Soutar responded by starting a new journal, which he titled The Diary Of A Dying Man and kept hidden from his parents under his pillow.

Here, in October 1943, William Soutar died. He was 45.

When I moved in to the house 18 months ago the only place you could eat a sit-down meal was Willie's room. I went out and bought a secondhand table so I could enjoy my dinner elsewhere. The room is used for meetings and workshops, otherwise I stay out of it. It's not that I'm superstitious, but I'm always slightly uncomfortable if the door is left open. This makes for the occasional disturbed night, but it also presents an irresistible opportunity to me as a tyro dramatist. Where better to stage a performance exploring the claustrophobia and frustration of Soutar's life and the qualified release he found in his poetry?

Undoubtedly, Soutar's illness influenced his work. You get to do an awful lot of daydreaming over the course of 13 years in bed; and for me, Soutar is pre-eminently a poet of the dwam. No-one is better at describing those trance-like, quasi-mystical moments when the everyday world is revealed as something much more rich and strange. As a reader, I can only be thankful for the existence of such poems as Reverie and The Halted Moment. But as a writer, I can't dismiss the terrible price Soutar paid for them.

The Soutar House can be visited by arrangement, telephone 01738 643687 A Soutar Spectacular, a series of mixed-media, site-specific performances, will be staged in Perth this autumn.