It would be wrong to say I didn't enjoy the Hay Festival — I did. But the rain, and an ancient beast of a tent, took the edge off my enjoyment.
As I hinted in my last email, the tent was big enough to cover a small platoon, and if it wasn't for the kind campsite host, we would have struggled.
He read the ancient diagrams that came with the tent pegs and managed to erect the odd-shaped metal frame in no time.
The first night was fine but then the rain came, and by lunchtime we noticed that the canvas was starting to leak, so we packed up and headed home.
But I'm painting far too bleak a picture of our trip to this delightful town on the English/Welsh border.
On Saturday night, I went to see poet Simon Armitage in conversation with writer John Harris, who told the audience he lived in Hay.
Armitage read some funny extracts from his new book Gig, about his love of music and life on the road as a poet, but he didn't read any poetry.
I bought one of his latest collections after the "gig", and got him to sign it, taking the opportunity to ask him if he fancied the job of Poet Laureate. Not surprisingly he didn't give me a straight answer.
The next day we puddled along the duckboards to see Julia Donaldson and her family perform musical versions of A Squash and a Squeeze, The Gruffalo and
other favourites.
My eight-year-old was slightly nervous about meeting the Gruffalo in person but I soon persuaded him that it was just a bloke in a costume.
While my wife was listening to a talk from a visiting cleric from the US, I took the lads round a couple of bookshops. Our first stop was Roses, a specialist children's bookshop with loads of old annuals in the basement, and next was Addyman Books in Lion Street, my favourite of the 30 or so bookshops in the town.
I love the sofas in the rooms upstairs, which make you want to stick around. I saw a nice edition of Buchan's Mr Standfast in colourful dust jacket but didn't want
to part with £25. Then there were some tempting leatherbound pocket editions of HG Wells's Kipps and The History of Mr Polly on a tiny bookcase on the stairs but I managed to pass on by. In the end, I spent about a tenner on four of Fleming's Bond stories in the Pan editions.
The book I enjoyed most during my time away was Graham Greene's Ways of Escape, a find in the central library at Westgate.
One idiot who borrowed the book before me insisted on inserting the letter R (for Roman presumably) in pen, every time the author used the word Catholic.
I know the author chose his words carefully, and was an avid book collector, so he would have deplored this pedantic desecration.
But when you visit Greeneland you come across these rum characters.