I go back regularly to Bryher, in the Isles of Scilly. We used to take our children and now take our grandchildren. Bryher is really small — just 92 people, a mile and a half end to end — and what suits us is the mix of walking and socialising.

Best of all, I hire a little cottage where I sit and scribble. I wander to it along the grassy verge in my bare feet, down Green Bay from the B&B, past the yachts clapping in the wind and the sound of oystercatchers.

I spend half the day working, then Clare and I chug off around the islands on our little boat. I’m no great sailor, but it’s fairly easy if you have your eye on the rocks and tides.

Not long ago, though, I was trying to get over the sand bar out of Tresco channel and thought I could thread my way through. I couldn’t, so we had to wait four hours for the tide to come up again. You’re sat there like a lemon, with every pair of binoculars looking at you. But it was funny.

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Rushy Bay is amazing. You sit on the beach, sipping rosé and looking out towards Samson Island — a place full of mysteries, which I’ve written about lots — and think the world is wonderful. Then, when the weather is wild and hammers against the windows, you huddle down with a book or a DVD. It’s exciting to see the sea heaving in at Hell Bay; magnificent and tragic.

We don’t just go to familiar places, though. My wife and I, realising that we have only a certain number of decades left, are exploring more and more. Last summer, we went to Monemvasia, at the bottom of the Peloponnese. We went by train and boat, and hired a car when we got there.

We stayed on an extraordinary outcrop with a Frankish castle above it. It was quiet, and I could walk up into the square and have a coffee. We got a wonderful routine going, and I wrote a whole book in a fortnight.

Clare does a lot of research, and her enthusiasm gives structure to our wanderings. All I ask is that we come to a place at the end where I can just sit and be. For her, it was a search for Byzantine chapels, so you go off-piste, down tracks. And things go wrong.

For instance, we had a puncture in the middle of nowhere, so had to find a place to stay. It was the most enchanting thing we did, because it was accidental. It opened our eyes to a small Greek community, Stemnitsa, that had existed for 1,000 years.

I get invited to a lot of literary festivals and went to Sri Lanka in January, to Galle. I did a couple of days talking about books, then we hired a driver and went to see elephants and beaches. Galle is an extraordinary Dutch fort, and it was where the tsunami came in.

I’ve written a book about the tsunami: the story of a boy who escapes on the back of an elephant. I talked to kids in a school where the waters had killed teachers. And there was a civil war going on, so you were aware of army people around. I like discovering something about a place that’s maybe a bit harsh, rather than just taking the sugary bits.

I live in the countryside, so peace is important.

The quietest city in the world is Venice. I go back and back. It’s like a theatre set. You just hear people, walking and talking, with the occasional chunter of a boat. We’re going in the summer with four grandchildren, because I think it’s good to pass on your love for places.

My wife likes pictures and buildings, and I feel you need to show them these things, because it may be the time that one of them thinks, “How unbelievably beautiful!” And I’m sure we’ll take them to listen to Vivaldi.

My book The Mozart Question was inspired by watching a child on a tricycle in his pyjamas, listening to a street musician. My wife and I stood there for half an hour. The boy never said anything — the music was getting to his very soul.

We also go snowshoeing in the Engerdin valley, in Switzerland. To walk on snow through the woods is magical, but exhausting. We made a mistake last time, walking with some German thirtysomethings, who were really fit.

We are sixtysomethings and not fit. This year, we’re going in summer, because we haven’t seen it without snow. And we’re going to go at our own pace.

Michael Morpurgo talked to Caroline Rees

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