Self-control: One day I’ll try some

No events until evening, so today we went book shopping. It's a dangerous thing in Hay – there are a lot of book shops. There are a lot of books. But tonight there are significantly less books in the shops, because a great many of them are now in my caravan. I couldn't help myself. There are whole rooms, here, filled with Science Fiction. There are whole other rooms filled with Science. There are books about subjects that I didn't even know were subjects. Strange, eclectic topics – like the memoir of a North Atlantic Trawlerman that I could not resist after reading just the first two sentences of the blurb.

When you come to the Hay Festival they tempt you, each day, with a copy of the Guardian newspaper that comes in its own canvas shoulder bag. You collect them. Then you go into Hay and fill them with books. Then your shoulders blister and dislocate and you know you've overdone it. Again. When am I going to read them all!!!

The main event, tonight, was Desmond Tutu, and the festival goers were out in force to see him. We chose Anthony Horowitz, though, and it was a good call. Here is a writer with so much drive and enthusiasm, and so many fingers in multiple pies that it makes you feel kind of guilty for ever thinking that a night's sleep might be preferable to writing. He speaks so quickly, the words falling over one another. But then he has so much to say, and all of it is worth hearing. I know of Anthony Horowitz's work as a writer of children's fiction – Alex Rider etc. But I had no idea how many TV series he has either created or written for: Poirot, Midsomer Murders, Foyles War, Murder in Mind… the list goes on and on. It was over far too quickly. Then as a bonus we wound up in the coffee bar where they had a live feed from the Desmond Tutu gig, which overran, so we got two for the price of one, almost.

Now, I have half-an-hour or so. Time to start making inroads into that hundredweight of books.