THE LESSONS WE NEVER LEARN (THANK GOD) - MAR 26 - 1.10PM

Festival opening dinner - Jewell Parker Rhodes

Classic 55-year-old faux pas last night.
Imagined I was 49 all over again and so over indulged in the beef and panacotta at the festival’s opening dinner.
When I was 18 I wouldn’t have batted an eyelid at a bit of baked cod for starters but the combination of this, a main and a dessert transported me straight back to the 14-year-old I once was who woke on Christmas Day to discover Santa had indeed delivered his first ever Galloping Gourmet cookbook.
Still, I hadn’t even started on my amuse-bouche when the joyous Jewell Parker Rhodes (an American book Award winner among other things) officially opened the festival with typical exhuberance.
Wonderful night and all thanks to the absurdly courteous staff at Worcester College.

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The night in Oxford was the most beautiful event I have ever done. Not just the spectacular setting (of the Sheldonian), but an unforgettable evening.

The Oxford Literary Festival is intellectual Viagra.

A stimulating and rewarding on-stage conversation; a lively informed and tolerant audience; privileged access to the great treasures of the Bodleian, and finally, wonderfully interesting dinner companions to help me conclude the best day I have enjoyed at any festival – anywhere.

It was a privilege for me to visit the festival to receive the Bodley Medal. As an incidental blessing I saw Oxford at its most mysterious and atmospheric. It was a day of piercing cold and as I walked through the twilight from the Sheldonian to Christ Church, the streets were empty and the whole city was shutting itself away. Christ Church was silent except for the footfall of unseen persons around corners and the sounds of evensong creeping from behind closed doors. For the first time I understood thoroughly the power of college ghost stories.

Every literary festival stays in an author’s mind for slightly individual reasons. I shall remember the Oxford festival for: - the size of the audience: at the top end of the range - their intelligence – this makes a huge difference for a speaker. In the Oxford audience I encountered many experts in the field my book covered and even one of the ambassadors I’d quoted - the beauty and the grace of the place itself – incomparable - the willingness of my hearers to buy books afterwards; I’ve never sold more.

I came away buzzing and reassured that we still have in this century a wide ranging community fascinated not just by famous authors (I’ve rarely seen so many concentrated in one place) but by challenging ideas and questions.

The Oxford festival is the most elegant and atmospheric of literary festivals. It’s a pleasure to both attend and perform there.

The Oxford Literary Festival has in my mind become the leading literary festival of the year. The organisation, the roster of speakers, the ambience and the sheer quality of it all is superb. May it now go from strength to strength each year stretching its ambition more and more. I believe it will.

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