It is perhaps quite normal for a person to model his or her life on a great mythical or historic figure: Jesus, Mohammed, Gandhi, Lincoln.
But how about John, Susan, Titty and Roger?
These mid-20th-century public school goody-goods from an obscure series of former bestselling children's novels do seem to have had an undue influence on the course of my life.
Journalist, adventurer, Bolshevik sympathiser and alleged spy and diamond smuggler Arthur Ransome abruptly changed to reclusive beslippered lakeland novelist and then thumped out a dozen wedge-thick books of frightfully jolly tales of camping, fishing, sailing and exploring.
The word count of his Swallows and Amazons series soars over a million - more than the Bible.
I could attempt to model my life on Ransome himself, but that might be aiming too high.
He was a leading journalist and war correspondent of the 1910s and '20s, reporting the Russian Revolution from ground zero, having his St Petersburg flat shot at and ransacked.
I would have found walking across the White-Red front (twice, carrying a typewriter, to attempt a peace treaty) a little daunting, and I doubt that I possess the pluck and prowess to be able to play chess with Lenin and Trotsky or select a marriage partner from among the Party staffers.
Being somewhat a young fogey, I could gladly emulate Ransome's retirement lifestyle, which revolved around sitting in armchairs and commissioning the construction of a series of ever more elaborate wooden yachts, many of which he never sailed to their full potential.
But I find fishing tedious, and he wrote all those books, which I could never manage.
Ransome's insufferably nice middle-class characters are often vague, hard-to-pin-down personalities of a type many children's writers employ in order to create blank templates with whom the young reader can readily identify (the rather bland protagonist of the Harry Potter books is a prime example).
The richness of Ransome's characterisation is in his minor characters: the rustic rural types, wizened nautical yarn-spinners, working-class urchins and the most spectacularly annoying aunt this side of Catherine de Bourgh and Augusta Bracknell.
As a Ransome fan, one is part of a very tiny portion of the population.
When I spent two years in the 1990s living in Japan, I had an instantly available circle of friends by joining the local fan club.
Japan has 120 million people, and about one millionth of these are Arthur Ransome enthusiasts.
The Arthur Ransome Club, founded in Japan in 1987, is the world's first fan club dedicated to the author, stoutly proud to have preceded the British one by three years.
They regularly hold re-enactments of various stories, with island camps, billy tea, yacht cruises and treasure hunts.
Doubtless the remaining 119,999,880 Japanese find them utterly batty.
Watching a video of the Arthur Ransome Society (the British fan club) on a coach trip to a stinking tidal mudflat, the storybook setting behind the English coastal resort of Walton on the Naze, the funniest bit is the expression on the bus drivers' faces (Blimey, what did they want to come here for?).
Like Ransome's characters, his fans spurn the mainstream, the gaudy daytrippers scorned as "natives", a feeling shared by every Lonely Planet-toting traveller who laments that Machu Picchu would be much nicer without all the tourists.
Ransome's books urged me, a devoutly unathletic lazybones with a morbid fear of water, to take up sailing; a couple of years later, I learned to swim, after I grew tired of the panic attacks every time I capsized, and the slightly baffled looks of Otago Harbour rescuers wondering what all the fuss in five feet of water was about.
I acquired a series of unreliable sailing dinghies and regularly finished the Otago Anniversary regatta last; the crew sent to take in the buoys would wait at each mark for me to tack around before they yanked it up.
I gave up sailing ("standing under a cold shower tearing up banknotes") when I realised I could get hypothermic just as easily by swimming at the beach free.
Ransome's books are full of the yearning and longing of a daughterless father (the author divorced from an ill-considered early marriage; his parental estrangement the price of marrying Trotsky's secretary) and there is a constant procession of orphaned or otherwise parent-deprived child characters.
The lack of adult figures gives Ransome's cast licence to get up to more adventure than a typical 21st-century parent would allow, going for days with scant supervision.
Our tiny, modern family sizes have a lot to answer for; happily, my childhood held the freedom that the safety-in-numbers of larger families provided.
So what is a life based on the divine teachings of the Swallows and Amazons series like?
There is an enthusiasm for the traditional, for the rural and rustic crafts, for sail over steam, for nature over development.
Ransome enthused over Ruskin and the Lake poets.
He had a sentimental infatuation with both the Tsarist social order and the Bolshevik Revolution, often blind to the violent enormities of both.
I am a wishy-washy socialist, occasionally dippy-Royalist republican, car-driving greenie.
And if I ever had the money, I would like nothing more than to commission the construction of a series of ever more elaborate wooden yachts, which I'd never get around to sailing to their full potential.
Peter Dowden is a Warrington resident.
