Mostly all the time nearly everything

Everyone who enters the stage begins by saying thank you
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That silence
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Mostly nearly all the time
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Tom Pickard’s astonishing depiction of a merlin chasing a skylark
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Helena Nelson owning the space, stepping in at a moment’s notice to replace Jen Hadfield
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Jonathan Edwards’s poem about a hippo from beneath the water in a zoo
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Suzannah Evans choosing to read a poem ‘because it is up in the men’s toilet, apparently’
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Kathleen Jamie at the Masterclass: ‘Get someone else to read your poem aloud, so you can hear it how they hear it’
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Laskey
Laskey
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Chatting with Anne Berkley about having the stationery thing
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Naomi, Naomi, Naomi. Come back! There is so much I still have to
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‘The only thing that never changes: the avant garde.’ Thomas Lux
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Dean Parkin telling me every Norwich City result from the last two years in the break after Julian Stannard. Julian Stannard. Wow
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A woman comes up to me and just starts talking about her cancer
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Team South Africa (you know who you are; the invitation to stay is an open one. This is not me being nice)
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Dan O’Brien’s huge lungfuls of air to get him through his extraordinary, long sentences
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Naomi
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Laskey’s voice nearly cracking, but not, in his poem for his friend, Roy Blackman
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‘Peter Sansom told me the poem was laminated’
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Yes! I am this enthusiastic all the time. I could be dead tomorrow. We all could
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Sex, Death and God: I think about them all the time! Adélia Prado.
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The man next to me humming gently to himself as I write this
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Beverly, Beverly, Beverly. Thank you.
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‘You have been airlifted into a mountain region and you have to make your own way down.’ Finuala Dowling
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In the car to the cafe Thomas Lux told me his five-year-old cousin was once picked up by the cheek by a horse. He still bears the horseshoe scar. Even this is a poem
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Note to self: learn to speak Portuguese! Obrigado!
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Friends I have known all my life for three days. There is still so much more we could

The Aldeburgh Poetry Festival blog