Daily life consists of erratic hours - in my case dawn starts - and uninhibitedly comfortable clothes – too many or too few according to season with annoying bits of hair pulled into a unflattering unicorn forehead bunch or with a pencil holding it all up (so incredibly chic on French models so, basically, sci-fi on the cheap, on me). Stella Duffy and I did an event together at the recent du Maurier Festival and she pointed out that one of the reasons women actors don’t like the word ‘actresses’ is because it still carries overtones of 18th century prostitution.

...The siren call of cream fudge, or cream teas with scones, or simply cream, is followed by the virtually vertical ascent up narrow lanes between tiny cottages lived in by the part-time fisher-folk of north London.

...But Fowey has the sort of bookshop writers like and hope they write for – Bookends – one part hand-picked new books and another part old leather, dust and foxing, dealing in the irresistible randomness of the second hand: the Rubaiyat of Omar Khayam, Pilgrim’s Progress, a set of Reader’s Digest Condensed Books, a dog-eared Peyton Place and The Shell Guide to Essex.

...It was the best sort of festival - combining real local flavour with smooth-running administration, a wonderful location at the extraordinary Fowey Hall Hotel - the ornate cliff-top house that was the inspiration for Toad Hall in The Wind in the Willows and, of course authors: I heard Linda Grant speak on the continuing resonations of the Baby Boom and their astonishing trajectories from patchouli oil, and finding profundity in the Desiderata (“Go quietly amid the noise and haste…”) to advertising and central London property ownership.

...Books, fudge, nesting ravens, shrieking gulls (try sleeping in Fowey to understand exactly where du Maurier got her inspiration from) friendly and engaged audiences, fresh crab, and, tucked down a side street, a gallery of bird photographs by Ian McCarthy, as dramatic and beautiful as any I have seen.