For those of us who grew up on Enid Blyton, Edith Nesbit, Charles Dickens, and other British writers and poets, a trip to the United Kingdom is a dream come true.

Everything is so different from what we see in our country — and yet everything is so familiar because we have imagined it this way all our lives.

We can see Julian, Dick, Anne and George (with Timmy, of course, to make up The Famous Five), eating just those scones that we are piling cream and jam upon. We can imagine some of the adventures they find themselves in the middle of, as we pass by ruined castles and lodges tucked away in the countryside. We can see Mr Darcy coming out of the morning mist towards Elizabeth Bennett. We can visualise, as William Wordsworth described for us, ‘a crowd, a host, of golden daffodils’ on the rolling fields of the Lake District. And when we ride on a little train pulled by a steam engine reminiscent of The Little Engine that could, we also see in our mind’s eye a longer train and figures in black gowns looking out of The Hogwarts Express.

It doesn’t matter that the itinerary we are following leaves us with little time to explore on our own. We get to stop, often for hours at a stretch, at all the places we have always wanted to see: Stratford-on-Avon; Sherwood Forest in Nottinghamshire; Bath — and the house that Jane Austen visited; Drumcliffe — where it just happens to be the 152nd birthday of William Butler Yeats and his poems are being read in a quiet little ceremony; Waterford — where a young Roald Dahl once raced down the streets in pursuit of fun and games he later transformed into his many well-loved tales; Inverness Castle, where one can imagine Macbeth peering out on a particularly dreary day to check whether Birnam Wood was on its way up to end his dreams of grandeur.

It is all there: Moments from fiction that thrilled us in our childhood and through our adult years. Reality merges with fiction and we cannot wait for the next stop on the itinerary, the next chance to sail off delightedly on cloud nine.

And at the next stop, we find ourselves unexpectedly treated to a day with our son, who happens to be in London while we are. With our heads still full of stories, we wonder what we can pack into those hours together to make them special.

There was a time when we would have rushed off on the Harry Potter tour or criss-crossed the city together on a hop-on hop-off bus tour.

That was the time when we would have made believe we were in the wizarding world ourselves: Yelling out the magic spells we knew so well and throwing up our legs and crying, “Alohomora!” as we held onto the trolley half-in and half-out at “Platform 9¾”.

Or, we would have recalled some of the gory incidents that took place at The Tower of London and looked around warily for ghosts; we would have let our eyes widen with wonder at the size of the Koh-i-noor diamond.

But now we don’t do all that. As an adult, our son no longer allows himself to show uninhibited delight, no longer jumps in his seat as he describes events in his life; so we, too, hold ourselves in check and quietly tell our tales of fiction transformed into reality and verdure beyond expectation.

But we cannot stop our delight from showing as we hang onto those moments in his company. And somehow all the excitement of our travels, the thrills, everything, pales ... The height of happiness is just being with him.

Cheryl Rao is a journalist based in India.