The Literary Festival

The Festival has now been and gone. I was invited to open the event with Frederick Forsyth being interviewed for the very first session. It was an honour to meet him and hear about his life and how everything began with his first novel the amazing "The Day of the Jackal". Julie and I sampled several more sessions including ones with Ben Okri (beautiful and sublime poetry and art fusion), Tom Bower (challenging views on Prince Charles), Chris Patten (elegant, funny and tragic review of politics over several decades), and Edward Stourton (enlightening insights into the BBC during WW2). 

And we attended the 'Author Party' on Saturday evening and were delighted to meet some more of contributors. If I had the time, I would have sat in on all the sessions! We are so lucky to have this feast of literature once a year.

Here is the speech I gave to open up the proceedings:

I would like to welcome you all to this glorious, illustrious and thrilling Literary Festival. This festival, along with a myriad of other University and Town events, initiatives, groups and organisations, is boosting what I have come the call the Imagination Quotient - the ImQ - of our wonderful town. Today we celebrate the priceless value of imagination and ideas. As Mayor of Buckingham, I chose ambition to be the theme of my first term. In this my second term, my theme is imagination without which there can be no dreams or ambitions. As it was famously said by Einstein (and I am grateful to the High Sheriff for reminding me of this quote recently):

“Imagination is more important than knowledge. For knowledge is limited to all we now know and understand, while imagination embraces the entire world, and all there ever will be to know and understand.”

So over the course of this weekend, we honour the authors who share their imagination with us. Perhaps so that we can exercise ours and the ImQ of Buckingham goes even higher!

I will end by welcoming the great Frederick Forsyth who honours us by being our first speaker. If I may, here is one of his quotes. For me, I interpret ‘wings’ to mean ‘dreams & ambitions’:

“The thing about wings that they are yours and yours alone. You cannot inherit them from an indulgent father; you cannot buy them in Savile Row; you cannot win them in a lucky draw; you cannot marry them along with a pretty girl; you cannot steal them on a shoplifting spree. You cannot even earn them in a team event. You fight and you struggle, you study and you learn, you practice and you persevere, and finally you do it alone, high above the clouds, in a single-seater.” (from ‘The Outsider: My Life in Intrigue’ by Frederick Forsyth, of course)

May we all fly in our own single-seaters, high above the clouds, over the next few days, lifted by our imagination and powered by our hopes for a world in which everyone can achieve their dreams and ambitions.

Here is Frederick Forsyth being interviewed for the first session

And here is Ben Okri conducting his 'poetry choir' with nine women from the audience reading out the poem 'And still I rise' by Maya Angelou

Thank you again for invitation to open the Festival. It was an honour!