And you'll find it, Sir Patrick Spence, in many collections of ballads or poems, and I hope you like it, and I hope you love all the other ballads you're going to see on the way to finding that.

Hello, this is Mark Radcliffe, and a book I really love is As I Walked Out One Midsummer Morning by Laurie Lee, who was from Gloucestershire and died in 1997.

He's famous for a classic and deeply poetic evocation of an English country childhood in Cider with Rosie.

But in this book from 1969, he sets out on foot on a trek across Europe, and it deals with a universal idea, the excitement and trepidation we've all felt at leaving behind the people and places that have loved and nurtured us.

This is how it begins.

The stooping figure of my mother, waist deep in the grass and caught there like a piece of sheep's wool, was the last I saw of my country home as I left it to discover the world.

She stood old and bent at the top of the bank, silently watching me go, one gnarled red hand raised in farewell and blessing, not questioning why I went.