A magical weekend at the Wigtown Book Festival
I had a magical weekend at the Wigtown Book Festival, chatting to appreciative locals and literary types about Love, Freddie and how I came to meet Freddie Mercury's unknown daughter. Great food, great company and the opportunity to hang out with other authors: book festivals are back...
To Wigtown Dumfries and Galloway, for the annual literary festival in Scotland’s National Book Town. Four trains and two sandwiches conveyed me over ten hours to Dumfries station, where a volunteer driver stop-started me to my billet in lashing rain.
I had attended the prestigious festival in the cool wilds of south-west Scotland before, back in 2016: the year of David Bowie’s death, when I was touring my biography ‘Hero’. Things have changed since the pandemic years, though the old town looks the same. Eccentricity and the unexpected rule.
I was delighted to find a dedicated Writers’ Room out back of Shaun Bythell’s renowned second-hand bookshop where we could wine, dine and hang with each other in ways that authors rarely get to do. For we who toil solo, likeminded interaction is early Christmas.
On my first evening, I caught up with BBC presenter Reeta Chakrabati, who was promoting her debut novel ‘Finding Belle’. I breakfasted next day at Nicole and Malcolm Court’s Craigmount with fellow guest-housers the former Corporation correspondent Rory Cellan-Jones, author of ‘A Year of Love and Hope with a Rescue Dog’, and TV presenter/author Gavin Esler, who was showcasing ‘Britain is Better Than This: Why a Great Country is Failing Us All’.
He later gave us Eight Books to Understand the World in an edgy presentation by Herald journalist Teddy Jamieson, to whom it would subsequently fall to quiz former First Minister of Scotland and SNP leader Nicola Sturgeon about her memoir ‘Frankly.’
On Sunday – which would have been the 74th birthday of the great Glaswegian singer songwriter and dear, lamented friend Jim Diamond – former NME scribe and award-winning comedy writer David Quantick and I undertook a double-hander for ‘I’m with the Band’, reliving the glory days of music journalism in a session chaired by, him again, Teddy Jamieson.
Marquee moments
LAJ with Lee RandallThe following day brought my big moment in the festival marquee, and a chance to thrill the throng with tales from ‘Love, Freddie’, how his secret daughter and I came to meet and how the story unravelled. The audience were onside, good questions coming thick and fast.
The queue for books and selfies at the end did plenty to offset the odyssey. At every turn, if only for a glimpse, a new pal.
Around half of the 20,000 visitors over Wigtown’s ten days flock from elsewhere. The other half are residents or live close by. All are fiercely loyal to their festival.
After my close-up, I was huddled Main Street-wards to Reading Lasses, a café and tearoom showcasing dense soups and doorstop cakes. In a tiny, book-lined room playing host to a dozen women, we ate parsnip pottage from bowls on our laps, dipping home-baked crusts and artisan butter. There was wine and laughter if not quite song.
Court-holding ladies compared retirement notes. Some declared it to be the secret; others scoffed that it was ‘skiving’ and ‘for sissies’. Farmers’ wives, tight teachers and two sets of sisters beamed.
A woman in waxed tartan and patent pumps flashed photos of her daughter’s wedding, more glam than a royal line-up. She breezed ownership of a brace of racehorses kept on a stud farm in Yorkshire, then dashed off late for her trumpet lesson.
Good wives of Wigtown
They had been at school together, the good wives of Wigtown. All different, yet all quite the same. I was the interloper, the fish out of water, with things to say while loitering within tent, but of no consequence away from the stage of the author’s posing.
In the town on the edge of somewhere on the road to nowhere, there are thirteen bookshops. There’s a Frying Scotsman for fish and chips, a pieman wielding wares through a window and a nice mum mixing environmentally friendly beauty potions.
Well-fed, freshly scented and deep in thought, I wended my way to the other tent and found Mr Jamieson yet again: this time quizzing ‘Big Daddy’ Steve Bunce about his boxing book ‘Around the World in Eighty Fights.’ Who later mused on X that it was a ‘quality event’, and that I am a ‘top banana’. I’ll take it.
Until Covid killed off many of them, book festivals rode the crest of a lucrative wave featuring writers famous for other things who had turned to celebrity book publishing. Few ‘proper’ authors could compete with the phenomenon. Things looked dicey for a bit, but I think we’re back.
