Home straight

Only three more days of Lowdham Book Festival to go. You can find the remaining programme on http://www.lowdhambookfestival.co.uk/. Today we went head to head with the footie with Daisy Hay talking about the "Young Romantics", Byron et al. She was wearing a rather nice dress with a daisy design. I wanted to ask if she always wears daisies. OK, our audience of 75 was a shade less than the tens of millions watching the football match, but still, not bad for an afternoon event. Maybe we need to make little Lowdham Book Festival flags we can put on our cars and bicycles. We also had our celebration of Alan Sillitoe. The biggie for this will be in Nottingham on October 2nd, but Alan was a great friend of the Festival and we wanted to mark that. We had a full house, and people were particularly pleased that David Sillitoe read some of Alan's work. Tomorrow we go Italian, Friday some Five Leaves irregulars, Berlie Doherty, John Harvey and Jon McGregor talk about their fave books. And then "the last Saturday" - 26 free events, a big book fair, cafe. I never get to see any of the speakers. My role is to stand in the one place and say "The WI is down there" or "No, I don't have any blutack" and "Right, I'll get more toilet roll". The cutting edge of literature.