countdown to the Essex Book Festival

Tickets to the Essex Book Festival go on sale today so Francis (in his capacity as Patron) was on BBC Essex's Dave Monk show giving a plug to Joanne Harris (who's appearing at our children's school in Dunmow) and to our joint event at Essex University but modestly saying nothing, as far as I heard, about his own talk at the Essex Record Office. I meanwhile was looking at the programme drooling with anticipation at various nautical events - Richard Woodman & his 'Nathaniel Drinkwater' novels  being but one treat on the horizon. Then I discovered Steven Russell writing in the East Anglian Daily Times about the headline appearance of Alastair Campbell and other Book Festival news and I realised just how much had happened since this time last year. In January 2009 The Adventures of Margery Allingham was a file on a printer's system - as her brther Phil's Cheapjack is now. I hadn't been to America or met Jim Huang and Jennie Jacobson of the Crum Creek Press and Francis's Strange Days Indeed was still scarily unfinished business. Steven Russell and Neil D'Arcy Jones were the first journalists to take an interest in the re-publication of Margery's biography and I was so grateful to them. For me it was the start of a quietly wonderful year.