John Baker’s Blog

We had non-transferable tickets (they were like gold dust) and went along legally to celebrate Hay’s 20th year and see if there was any food. We took the hotel proprietress, Miss Havisham, along though she had nothing suitable to wear and anyway would not have changed out of her tattered wedding gown for a corporate [...]

At the first of Mariella Frostrup’s shows in the Sky Arts Studio we found that Ian Rankin had been relegated in favour of Gordon Brown. What a disappointment.
Brown had nothing to say, of course, apart from name-dropping the courageous people he had met. Thomas Keneally, the Australian novelist, was on the same bill, also to [...]

The landscape changes quite quickly. For hours we’re travelling across the flatlands of England and almost imperceptibly this gives way to rolling hills and mountains in the near distance. The roads narrow down to country lanes with those high, high hedges on both sides. At the same time as this is happening the sun is [...]

The adventure begins here:
It was then that I began to understand that everything in the room had stopped, like the watch and the clock, a long time ago… I glanced at the dressing table again, and saw that the shoe upon it, once white, now yellow had never been worn. I glanced down at the [...]