Read On?

As soon as the Bath Literature Festival publishes its programme I snap up tickets for events until I’ve drained my overdraft facility dry. This year I’ll once again be all over the whole shebang, from the Love-in at the Bath Poetry Cafe on opening day to Rumpole of the Bailey with Timothy West in the final hours. I’ll be clinging on to every word uttered, snapping up signed editions and developing fleeting, inappropriate crushes on cultural icons on a daily basis; yup, the BLF is my version of Glastonbury (without, of course, the loutish crowd, the uncivilised accommodation and the vulgar weather). But this year more than ever before, I know my annual arty indulgence represents little more than a tourist excursion to a cotton-wool wrapped satellite orbiting the culturally-depressed, cash-strapped real world where libraries are living on borrowed time, 9% of boys (and 6% of girls) begin secondary school with a reading age barely above that expected of a seven year old and Jamie’s 30 Minute Meals, George Bush’s autobiography and The Secret (don’t ask!) top the UK’s best-selling books charts; given such a climate, I’m acutely aware that a lit fest is a chocolate teapot sitting on the fringes of the surreal Mad Hatter’s tea party that Britain is swiftly turning into.

Given this depressing reality, it would be easy to write off lit fest fans as a drooling flock of head-in-the-sand sycophants who slavishly read everything on the Man Booker shortlist so they know which author’s names to drop at their next dinner party, but to do so would only serve to highlight my own confused, contradictory state: after all, I’ve already outed myself as being firmly ensconced in their swooning, star-struck ranks. But oh, how I wish the BLF would, for once, relieve me of the guilt that nibbles away at the corners of my temporary pleasuredome and mash things up a bit in order to address the state of the (increasingly non-bookish) nation.

Although I’m ridiculously excited at the prospect of attending an audience with Howard Jacobson, wouldn’t it be ace if he was in conversation with, say, Dave Eggers - a writer whose work with disadvantaged, vulnerable, illiterate American kids really is a Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius - about how to raise support for similar projects in the UK? As well as chairing the debate I’m most eagerly anticipating (Does Feminism have to start all over again? March 5, the Guildhall), I’d love to see Kate ‘Labyrinth’ Mosse - co-founder and Honorary Director of the Orange Prize for Fiction - involved in a prime time, rabble-rousing call to arms to Get Girls Writing rather than heading up what’s likely to be a polite, genteel chat attended by well-meaning lady lunchers killing time between the two Jane Austen-related events taking place at the Guildhall on the same day. And although there will indeed be a debate billed as an opportunity “to explore how educators are rising to the challenge of delivering high-quality, creative education in a time of budget cuts and an unpredictable future,” (Tuesday 1 March), I wish this crucial subject had been allocated a bit longer than the 60-minute time slot scheduled to take place when most of the people who’d benefit from (and input to) such a discussion are at work (or actually, maybe they’re not any more - in which case, the ‘no concessions’ edict on the ticket price is a farce too). And imagine if, instead of supporting the 5-day, non-stop God-book binge that is the ‘Bath Bible Challenge’, the BLF’s Great and Good embarked on a tour of Somerset to protest against the proposed closure of 20 of the 34 libraries in the county. But hey, at least there are still a few tickets left for Jonathan Bate’s introduction to the romantic imagination; at every lit fest, the most one can hope for is an opportunity to dream on.