Whisky for parents: Latin for all

 

It was the sight of the Highland Park promotional team handing miniature scotches to the parents queuing  for Jacqueline Wilson which made the first weekend of the Times Cheltenham Literature Festival so memorable.

Well, one of the things, anyway.

While audiences inside the tents were being swayed by the severest novelists and historians, the line for entry to the child-world of Ms Wilson was like a character in a fantasy itself, long, snaking, mostly young and patient and fortified, at the older age levels, by plastic cups of what I'm told (not being a whisky drinker) is a most magnificent malt.

Thanks to Mary Beard, who has already described some of our classics events, the words of 'laudabunt alii' and 'odi et amo' were displayed on large flashing screens over the scotch lawn. A friendly crowd came to hear me talk face to face about Spartacus Road with Ramona Koval who normally I talk to only over thousands of miles of air and sea on the ABC Books Show in Melbourne. The poet Statius, who has a starring role in that book got a decent vote in the Ancient Booker: since, of all the writers on the short-list, he was the one who most cared about winning prizes, he would have been disappointed with his champion, I am sure. So, sorry, Stace (the name by which Chaucer knew him).

Tonight we have the real Booker. And tomorrow with the TLS and Spartacus Road to the Boston Book Festival, boosted (lest even without whisky excess I might begin to flag) by a very welcome review by Frank Wilson in the Philadelphia Inquirer today.