took place between Friday 12 and Sunday 14 March 2010.

The majority of authors spoke in the school hall, however there were a couple of talks over the weekend given in St Mary’s Church, (the church also housed an art display by a local art group).  While the school hall and church were being utilised by the speakers, the village hall become the ‘festival cafe’ and home to the Waterstone’s bookstall.  The village hall was totally transformed into a ‘cafe’ by a small team of volunteers who worked unbelievably hard across the weekend serving teas, coffees and delicious homemade cakes.

Day 1 - After weeks of planning and a few last minute changes, including the fact that I had to completely rearrange the opening ceremony due to a conflict in HRH The Countess of Wessex’s diary, the first morning of the festival was upon us.

HRH The Countess of Wessex opened the festival at 11.55am at Kempsford Primary School.  As well as the creator of the festival, Tim Hastie Smith, the Headmaster and the Chair of Governors I was there to meet HRH in my capacity as Festival Director.  Following these introductions HRH was then given the opportunity to interact with the youngest children waiting to greet her - they were dressed up as characters from their favourite books and waving Union Jack flags.  After this slightly soggy start outside, HRH then moved inside and took her place on stage next to the author Sandra Howard.

Following the official opening by HRH, the headmaster then called upon a few of the children to read passages from their chosen books.  This was promptly followed by a fashion parade of book characters and it was left to HRH and Sandra Howard to select a winner from each year.  The press were present for the ceremony and took great delight in capturing an image of ‘Dennis the Menace’ (who was one of the characters in the fashion parade) poking his tongue out at HRH!  The image went on to appear in the Saturday editions of both the Daily Telegraph and The Sun newspapers!  Better coverage we couldn’t have asked for.

Upon completion of the opening ceremony Sandra Howard then made her way to St Mary’s Church to give the first speech of the festival, ‘A Matter of Loyalty’. 

The remainder of the first day saw another 6 speakers participating in the festival; Susan Hill, Michael Dobbs, Joanna Trollope, Gyles Brandreth, Patrick Mercer and Chris Hunter.   There was an excellent turnout for all speakers and everybody I spoke to coming out of a talk was full of praise for the calibre of speaker.  I finally finished at around 10.30pm with the book signing by Patrick Mercer and Chris Hunter.

Day 2 - The second day of the festival commenced at 09.45am with a talk by the children’s author Elizabeth Lindsay.  I have to confess that if there is ever to be another festival I will ensure that we have a wider selection of authors for children so that we can be more age specific for each of the talks (for example 5 – 7 year olds and 10 -11 year olds).  On this occasion, due to the huge number of author’s that were signed on for the project when I became involved, there were really only 2 slots for children – Elizabeth Lindsay and the illustrator, Susan Keeble.  That said we had a good turnout for both and it was lovely to have the local children involved in the festival.

The rest of Saturday continued on a very tight schedule with only 1hr 15minutes between each author.  Again this was due to the fact that we had a great many authors involved but really only one location, (due to the lack of facilities at the Church we made the decision to try and keep as many speakers as possible in the school with the amenities it/the village hall could provide).

Once again we had a very good calibre of author’s on the Saturday including, but not limited to, Dame Stella Rimington, Nicholas Coleridge, Lord Hurd, Patricia Routledge, Felix Francis, Oliver James and Adrian Tinniswood.

The final event on Saturday evening was a QI style quiz which was hosted by Justin Pollard (author and script writer for QI).  This event was held in the village hall and saw 80 people compete in teams of 8 while enjoying bread, cheese, wine and fruit and attempting to answer questions on a variety of subjects from the somewhat obscure to the practically impossible to answer!

Day 3 -The final day of the festival was much shorter with only 5 speaker slots.  Anne Atkins was the first speaker at 11am and rather than talk about her books Tim Hastie-Smith interviewed her.  This was therefore a slightly different format to the majority of speakers we had talking across the weekend.  The remainder of Sunday saw talks given by Dr Anthony Seldon, David Faber and a fascinating ‘Women in History’ debate. 

The final speaker of the day was the quite remarkable Camila Batmanghelidjh who closed the festival by speaking at St Mary’s Church. 

All in all it was a very successful weekend and as you can see from some of the comments that I’ve posted on the ‘Testimonials’ page it was an incredibly well received event.   Although we are still working on the final figures I am confident that we will have raised a not insignificant amount for the local community – the school, the village hall and the church.  Not bad for a relatively unknown village somewhere near the M4!

I am now looking forward to my next project – a large summer party.....