Festival day

Text coming .... Need to get home first .... And the battery is very low

Yesterday was my venture out to Edinburgh's festival land. Super day.

At lunchtime, I was at a performance from poet, writer and performer Liz Lochhead our Scots Makar (our version of the poet laureate). As always, she was hugely entertaining - humorous, nostalgic (reflecting on vinyl or LPs as they used to be called) and serious. Touching tribute to Michael Marra one of her collaborators who died last year.

Then an afternoon in the pub with Jon, an old work colleague. He was looking well and it was good to hear how he saw his future going. His photo almost made is as the blip but it was even more blurry than the one of the castle. It was taken late on in the afternoon when spaces between words were beginning to disappear.

Then to a performance with Iona by Patti Smith / Philip Glass in honour of the poet Allen Ginsberg. Absolutely absorbing stuff. And just like Liz Lochhead earlier the performance included much work by others. Patti Smith had visited the home of Robert Louis Stevenson earlier in the day and treated us to some poems from his Garden of Children's Verse.

Edinburgh is buzzing. The photo is of the Castle with an ornamental thistle in the foreground, taken as we rushed to catch the evening performance and I couldn't think of any other place I'd rather be.