This took place last Thursday and I don't know that I would normally have bothered to go, except that this year the speaker was J D Kirk, so that was a bit of a no-brainer.
The OH was off to Glasgow to see the new Star Wars with Son No 2 so we parked the car in town and I caught the bus to Stirling (it would have been the train but as we were walking past the bus station the Stirling bus was in, and although my Senior Railcard gets me cheap rail travel, my age gets me free travel on the bus. Also it was still five minutes walk to the rail station and it was chucking it down with rain, so the decision to get on the bus was also a no-brainer. (Coming back something similar happened, I had to walk through the bus station to get to the train station in Stirling and the bus for Alloa was in and due to leave in five minutes as opposed to twenty five for the train, so again, not a hard decision. Hooray for buses1)
I spent several happy hours mooching about Stirling visiting the sort of shop where I like to browse and the OH stands stock still and gives off. why are you looking at that? vibes. He says this is unconscious and I daresay it is, but it doesn't make for comfortable browsing, so it was nice to be able to go into whatever shops I fancied and spend as long as I wanted in there without feeling guilty. Despite this I didn't make it into my all time favourite shop in the city which is Made in Stirling and is a delightful place, but I just didn't have the time. This was partly because it took an unconscionable amount of time trying to find somewhere with a spare table where I could have lunch. Stirling sees its fair share of tourists and so it isn't shore of cafes/restaurants/pubs but even by 11.45 they were mostly rammed. To be fair I can't speak to the pubs because I'm of a generation which brought girls up not to go in pubs on their own so I don't.
I was fortunate enough to find someone from he U3A Crime Fiction reading group also at the event, and with a spare seat beside him so we had a good chat before proceedings began. Once it started JD was very good value; rather more so than his interviewer Nicola Meighen, previously encountered at the Rebus event at last year's Bloody Scotland, and who has an irritating habit of interjecting when her subject is in full flow, usually to try and show off how clever/thoughtful/well read she is. To be clear, I'm not saying she isn't all of those things and more; what I am saying is that if your interviewee is holding the audience all on his/her own you don't need to chirp up every few minutes for the sake of it. Despite this, I thoroughly enjoyed the event.
We were given a physical copy of the brochure for this years festival which was great because previously, as in before we moved, I struggled to make sense of the on-line one. So that was a good thing. All the more disappointing then that I struggled to find anything very much to get excited about. I marked up eight possibles, and reduced those down because of timing issues to three and I'll sort out some tickets at a later date. I have a couple of friends who might be keen to go to some of the other events and I'll happily tag along; I suppose part of thre fun of these events iss getting introduced to authors you don't already know and who might be great to listen to in person and whose books might become firm favourites.
More to come on this, but probably not until September, which is festival time.
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