THANK YOU, THANK YOU, THANK YOU

First of all, I'd like to extend a generous ‘thank you' and a clap on the back or an awkward kiss on the cheek to whoever it was who returned pages 5-6 of my homemade notebook. I can't believe anyone would actually bother to look for it, but just as I was about to go to sleep last night I heard shuffling in the hotel corridor and the sound of a bit of paper being stuffed under my door. So I jumped out of bed and scurried into the corridor, but whoever it was was gone. Well, thank you, anyway, whoever you are. And if you'd still like to claim your reward, I'm planning to leave it outside the door to Stage 1 of the festival at around 8pm. It will be inside the Tesco's carrier bag I've been using to keep my dirty socks and boxer shorts in. Enjoy it. You deserve it. Unfortunately, though, I'm still no clearer to finding out exactly what ‘amazing' things I wrote on pages 5-6 as it turns out the writing is indecipherable. At first - standing there at 3am, blinking and rubbing my eyes - I thought I was just a bit too tired and drunk to read it properly. But in the cold light of day, I see now that the paper has been soaked through and my writing has become a big black smudge. (I'm assuming that whatever was written caused my anonymous do-gooder to cry all over it.) Fair enough. Secondly, could I please apologise for the misplaced apostrophe in yesterday's column. This catastrophic error somehow happened during the phrase ‘smokers' club' (which I mistakenly wrote as ‘smoker's club' and which An de Greef, my translator, kindly pointed out to me this morning). It's possibly been fixed by now, but I'm really, really sorry about it, anyway. This morning we attended a talk with a translator called Steven Something-or-Other at the International Court of Justice, and the question was asked: ‘What do you do if the original source text is written badly? Do you just replicate the bad writing in your translation, or do you, you know, write a more elegant version?' Which made me wonder what An did about my misplaced apostrophe. Did she leave it in? Or is part of her job to make me look a better writer than I am? Also, I wonder what she'd would do if, you know, I wrote, grammatically bad sentences all the time? Its' an interesting question maybe. (Sorry An. I feel like I just gave you a small headache.) Anyway, I'm having a nice time at the Crossing Border festival so far. I spotted Louis Theroux walking around yesterday and made a strange accidental face at him. I saw Cass McCombs play a really good set. I watched people become slightly bored of Death Cab for Cutie. And I talked to a couple of my Dutch equivalents who are part of the ‘Den Haag Verhalen' project. Right, now I need to go and put some things from my hotel room in the Tesco's bag. Maybe I'll leave one of my socks in, too, as a ‘bonus prize'.