And you thought all the Hobbits had gone...

[davem]

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/pages/liv...n_page_id=1770

Ok, so put aside the usual Daily Mail ranting about 'evil beaurocrats', just skip to the bottom of the article:

But for Fairweather himself, his greatest tale is probably the story of his own life. "When I was a boy I was obsessed with the story of Merlin the wizard.

"I decided that I should like to be a wizard myself - to grow whiskers, live in the woods surrounded by books and know lots of things that other people didn't."

Today, he maintains he has done just that. He fingers his muttonchop moustache and describes his 200-year-old Devon cottage, where one wall is "a cliff of books, and I sit by my open hearth, translating tales from Medieval Latin that no one else can decipher. When I step through the door I am like a rabbit disappearing into my secret place".