I had quite a busy Festival, given that I could only really see shows that were also suitable for littleson. Here is a snapshot of what we saw.

Shappi Khorsandi‘s stand up show: gentle humour – not as funny as the radio show, but passable.

New Art Club: Big Bag of Boom. Contemporary dance comedy. Those guys just crack me up – especially the bits about how space becomes significant.

Ovid’s Metamorphoses by Pants on Fire: Endlessly inventive, beautifully performed Revue style romp through the Myths

Leo Kay in It’s Like he’s Knocking – beautiful, intimate performance about coincidence and his father, with free vodka.

Flesh and Blood and Fish and Fowl – a production by Barrow Street Theatre in New York (who have hosted Old Man’s shows) Beautiful, funny bag of tricks both physical and visual.

Matthew Zajac performing his moving one man and musician show, The Tailor of Inverness – again, a show about an immigrant father, in this case, Polish to Scotland.

Babbling Comedy, The Perfordian Sow, which was an oddly unsettling show by four Korean men who were channeling babies. Not sure what I felt about that one – their innocence was so tainted, it made me feel a little ill.

An amazing hip-hop Midsummer Night’s Madness by an insanely talented bunch of young people from Hackney Empire’s Hackney Harlem Theatre Company.

Bell Shakespeare’s Just Macbeth: A wonderful, good natured Australian Shakespeare for kids.

Tabu by Nofitstate Circus, the highlight of the festival for me. A glorious, romantic celebration of behaving badly, with wild, live music acting with and around the beautiful, glamorous circus performers.

At the Book Festival, I attended a cookery writing workshop with Nell Nelson in the hope that one day all the food from my fiction might be able to materialise in recipe book form. I saw Louise Doughty and Blake Morrison talk about Contemporary Novels full of Guilt and Pain – a subject just up my street! I also enjoyed Lionel Shriver, AL Kennedy and Anthony Bourdain talk about their writing, (and fantasising about what I’m going to say when it’s my turn up there). The main thing I carried away from each of these is that all writers find their work difficult and at times quite frightening, but all have to do it.I also met up with the lovely Nicola Morgan, author of the entertaining and downright useful Help! I need a Publisher! blog, and attended Making the Most of your Writing by Jane Smith of the How Publishing Really Works blog and Keith Charters of Strident Publishing. Littleson and I also really enjoyed a talk on screenwriting for teenagers by the magnificent William Nicolson.

And I went to the Surrealism exhibition at the Dean Gallery – I particularly enjoyed looking at the publications from around then, and the Man Ray photographs. Over the road at the Modern Art Gallery, I loved the Boyle Family stuff, especially the Barra pieces.