Thank you and goodnight...

I went to see two events at the Book Festival today:

Horror and Weirdness: A Scottish Peculiarity. Here Margaret Atwood, Ian Rankin and Valerie Martin talked about the darker side of fiction and Scotland's rich history of literary horror and how it has influenced contemporary literature. A very interesting event, where I learned a lot about Scottish writing.

Next was a literary head to head between Neil Gaiman and Margaret Atwood. These are two of my favourite authors. I have to admit though that Margaret Atwood has been out of my good books for a while, ever since she was particularly rude to me at the book festival a couple of years ago. But she is a great writer, and the Handmaid's Tale, The Blind Assassin and Oryx and Crake list among my all time favourite books. So I gave her another chance...after all, I couldn't miss the opportunity of seeing these two great minds discussing how they do what they do. It was really great and I thoroughly enjoyed myself.

This is Neil and Margaret on stage. I was all set to blip a picture of them signing books, but this was too good a shot not to show you!

And here ends my 2013 Edinburgh festivals run. I have seen 32 shows/events over the past month and some of them have been blisteringly good. I'm thinking here of Terry Pratchett, Boris & Sergey, and Missing, to name a few favourites.

I think it's fair to say that the festival grinch has been banished. I'm a little sad that its now over, but super excited at getting the city back to normal. Perhaps there's a little grinch left in me after all...