For my weekly writing spot on this site, see the One-Minute Mystic, with a new meditation posted every Monday. Also see The Village, the story of Misty Longings, England's most beautiful village, posted episode by episode earlier this year.       He died at Gad's Hill Place, aged 58, and we celebrate his birthday this week. He was born on February 7th, 1812, just outside Portsmouth, where his father John worked in the Naval Pay Office. But Gad's Hill in Kent was special to Charles Dickens. Once, when a small boy, his dad had pointed out this very house to him, declaring it to be a worthy ambition for him. Such was the influence of father on son that 40 years later, he bought it. Dickens' coffin was covered in scarlet geraniums, his favourite flower. He had loved colour, dressing always in vivid clothes. He had also loved light – so his family spurned tradition, and left the curtains open in the dining room where his body lay. And in death, there came a change. It was reported that in later years, wearied by the changes and chances of his restless eyes, he had acquired a "sarcastic look". But that went in death. Katey, his daughter, who sat with him, noticed how there returned to his face, "beauty and pathos". It was the face he himself had described in Oliver Twist – "the long forgotten face of sleeping infancy". Death for Dickens was both a departure – and a return. Journalist above novelist, he described a world which both robbed and bestowed childhoods. And not for him, long literary descriptions of character. Allowing two or three lines on appearance, he'd establish the rest through dialogue. He knew realistic dialogue involved the reader more completely than anything else. He wired his writing into the kindness and sadness of realism – warming our hearts with repentance in Christmas Carol; making us cry with the death of Little Nell in the Old Curiousity Shop. Pirates stole his work shamelessly. Changing only titles, names and small events, they reproduced it as "penny purchasers". Dickens was not displeased to win a crucial court case against them. As he reflected: "The pirates are beaten flat. They are bruised, bloody, battered, smashed, squelched and utterly undone." We close with the opening lines from one of Dickens' lesser known works: Master Humphrey's Clock: "The reader must not expect to know where I live. At present, my abode may be a question of little or no import to anybody; but if I should carry my readers with me, and there should spring up between them and me feelings of homely affection and regard attaching something of interest to matters ever so slightly connected with my fortunes, even my place of residence might one day have a kind of charm for them. Bearing this possible contingency in mind, I wish them to understand, at the outset, that they must never expect to know it." But we do know it. More even than Gad's Hill Place, Dickens' home was his imagination and things lost along the way. More writings © Simon Parke