We nearly be done, it'll be all over bar the washing-up by the end of this evening so my grateful thanks to the intrepid Happy Campers who have done Team DGR proud with their tireless efforts in the tea room eating almond torte flying all over the festival on our behalf, and my thanks to them both for some wonderful event reports. Here's Angela's final offering for this year...
My last festival action before the promised cream tea back in the DGR tent. As I was preparing to hear Emma Kennedy’s talk on her latest book ‘ I left my tent in San Francisco’, Bookhound was assembling plateloads of scones and setting out ranks of cups and saucers as the DGR faithful listened rapt to William Fiennes. So I was alone for the first time because Linda was in the land of the Snow Geese.
The floor at the front of the Bowling Green tent was looking a bit worse for wear. There was that detritus that arises from large groups of people gathering and then dispersing after eating sweeties while listening to Kate Winslet and Lauren Child (in my case wuffling a bacon buttie for a very late breakfast).
Emma Kennedy - sporting a broken elbow - started off by reading us an amusing extract which explains why the book has the title it does and as the story unfolded I felt grateful that the trials of the Happy Campers had only really amounted to some forgotten cooking utensils. Compared with skunks, agonising walks in searing heat, and a dwarf called Samson in a red Ferrari (whose strength was not in his hair but somewhere else) our mundane little under canvas challenges were never going to provide material for a best seller. Questions from the audience revealed that surprisingly, Emma Kennedy is still friends with her long suffering travelling companion and the pair of them did go on to lead useful lives……..hope then for all those parents of gap year students.
A trip back to the 1970s again, (do I deliberately seek out the decade of my childhood?), this time when Emma Kennedy read from her other book, ‘The Tent, the Bucket and Me’. I was looking at the cover of this in the book tent. You would know it was a 1970s memoir from the font used for the title; Simon Garfield would be able to tell you instantly which one it was. Sort of bubbly, a cross between The Goodies and an Egon Ronay cookery book. Kate Winslet might need to watch her position of ‘best reader using funny voices ‘. Emma Kennedy’s Welsh dad came to glorious life, if Linda had been with me she might have dumped Ivan (for elucidation refer to Harmony Hairspray moment) there and then. There was even another Old Granny in there too.
Thanks, Emma for a really upbeat end to my Port Eliot experiences.
Recent Comments