The Toast's previous literary pilgrimages can be found here. Not too long ago, I found myself on a dusty bus rumbling through French Catalonia, trailing a dead man called Patrick O’Brian. I would find him in a tiny fishing village called Collioure. “It would have been easy to miss Collioure altogether,” he once wrote, “but I did not.” O’Brian might have liked it if everyone else missed Collioure altogether, myself included. He was a notorious misanthrope.