One word

Title: On finding the single word that encapsulates both the entire week and this specific Friday evening; warming to Salman Rushdie when he said some people need to CALM THE FUCK DOWN and spotting Patti Smith waiting for the Salman Rushdie interview but being too awestruck to say hello to her but thinking on reflection that she probably wouldn’t have liked that anyway, and trying not to be pissed off that after much soul-searching I had missed (BIG MISTAKE) Jenny Owen Youngs and Junot Diaz so I could go to see Alasdair Gray at Scottish Night, but then he didn’t appear, so instead there was ENDLESS WAITING through a set by Mike Heron & daughter who had obviously been asked to cover the gap and I’d already missed half of John Burnside’s reading because I’d gone into THE WRONG ROOM and spent 20 minutes wondering why the performers at Scottish night had Icelandic accents, and catching the end of Michael Bracewell who almost translated the etymology of GLAMOUR correctly and feeling grateful to Hugh Cornwell who I wasn’t too bothered about seeing but when I did his music cheered me, even the SONG ABOUT NIGHTMARES, although he was better when he didn’t speak; and being mindful that Krijn Peter has to translate two columns AND prepare a performance poetry set and that we did have a playful agreement that the last column would consist of THE ULTIMATE WORD that would convey everything about Crossing Border and that would also be the same word in both ENGLISH and DUTCH and so would need NO TRANSLATION and that if it became necessary to perform the column we could then do so simultaneously in both languages

Festival.