The debrief meeting for Words@FromeFestival team is traditionally a jolly rather than a postmortem. The sun shone on Alison's garden while we nibbled Mike's amazing tapas and congratulated each other.
We did eventually all sit down round the table but that was more of a praline karioke than a financial and aesthetic analysis.
All over now for another year... till October, anyway, when the the word bunting begins to come out again for next year.

Q: Is it ok to have a main character we don't like?
A: Yes, if they go the journey to self-resolution, like Austen's Emma or Hosseini's Amir in The Kite Runner - but we should be aware readers spend hours with these people and as Sarah Duncan has pointed out, that's like being stuck in a lift with someone you detest.
A point pondered during a lively Fromesbury meeting at Emily's, with updates from the group: Debby Holt's next novel "Love Affair for Grownups" out in January, and Debs Hughes "Ultimate Supply Teachers Handbook" already on the shelves in eyecatching splendour.

'What think you of falling in love?' is Rosalind's suggestion when her cousin Celia casts around for Friday night entertainment. They settle for Mafia-inspired wrestling, chatting with stray from 'Allo 'Allo, and running off into a forest full of banished dukes, but love of course intrudes, and triumphs in the end. It's 'As You Like It' , entertainingly performed by the Bradfordian Dramatic Society in the gardens of Winsley Dorothy House, where the woodland slowly illuminated as dusk fell. Magical.


And it's the last Bath Poetry Cafe at the Mission Theatre before the summer break. 'What a triumph this has been' says organiser Sue Boyle - ''Seven months, from a standing start, full every month!' It's a real privilege for Hazel & me, as 'Live & Lippy', to share in this amazing line-up: from Linda Saunder's lucent elegy 'on the vulnerability we all feel on an edge between past and unknown future' to laptop cellist Caleb Parkin's 'Hexadecimalice'... a brilliant evening of experimentation and classical quality. (Thanks Alan for the picture)

..