Wigtown Book Festival

A friend gave me a lift down to this. We just had the afternoon. I caught two events, first was a session with Stephanie Calman. I've never heard of her before, but apparently she has a book out called Confessions of a Bad Mother, and was launching another about when we can define ourselves as being truly adult. She also edits a website based on the bad mother idea. I think I'm just passed all this sort of stuff, in fact I don't think I ever felt bonded to other women by virtue of being a mother/parent. I found the whole session a bit middle class and Islington.The audience was the usual reserved, Scottish type one, so I didn't learn very much about what they thought either.

The thing I went for was to see Jackie Kay the poet launch the 2nd Wigtown Poetry competition. She's going to judge the entries written in English. She did a brilliant reading, including a poem about Julia Darling, another poet I love. They were friends and the poem speaks about holding Julia's hand at her bedside in the last days of her life, and singing her the Mingalay Boat song, which include the words "hail ya ho boys, let her go boys...." It was a brilliant afternoon in the local distillery hall. She can move you from laughter to tears in seconds. I took this picture, the grey head is Jackie's Mum