Last Day of the Festival

And here are some of the things that I forgot to mention earlier!
I went back to the Buttermarket yesterday to chat to the lady with the stall opposite Shelley and her silk scarves. Mostly, she does decoupage, on a variety of items like bowls and picture frames. She's called Jo Verity and her work can be found at www.joveritydesigns.net
She's also recently learned the technique of taxidermy, and she had a couple of field voles and a squirrel on her stall, under glass domes, with little leather satchels and clothed like something out of Beatrix Potter - they're really quite sweet, and ethically sourced.
And the Masonic Hall wasn't just playing host to music and a beer tent over the week - they also had a collection of wooden sculptures by Danny Thomas, who does chainsaw carving - his work can be found at www.thomascarving.co.uk
It was a bit dark to see during the music there, but there were also paintings and other things made of wood in the hall.
And over on the Riverside site, there were fireworks on Friday and Saturday nights. I missed the Friday display, but saw the Saturday one from my bedroom window.
And now the tents are coming down in the Castle Gardens as the caterers pack up, and it's all over for another year.
So I had a look at the clips that the BBC have put up on their website, and wished that I could have got to see the discussion about Mary Renault and her novels about Ancient Greece, and Sandi Toksvig talking about her heroines of fiction and history, though she also seemed to find the fictional heroines rather disappointing - Jo March marrying Professor Behr instead of Laurie, and Anne of Green Gables giving up university to marry Gilbert Blythe and have eleven children, or however many it was. And several people came into the shop today saying how good Michael Morpurgo was in his talk about his picture book The Mozart Question. And I missed good music from Tinariwen, the Tuareg band from Mali, and one of my friends has been raving about how good one of the tents down of the Riverside site was, part of the How the Light Gets in festival.
But there's always next year....