Garrison Keillor is a strange one. There’s no doubt he gives great radio. He’s been doing it a while, and as he pointed out in verse to BBC Radio Scotland presenter Claire English on a Festival Café broadcast last week: “The secret of a long career is to keep going and never fade, and not think about your reputation even for one minute.” Keillor’s lugubrious brand of humour, peppered with irony, has so far kept him in work and on American radio  virtually continuously since 1974 with his show A Prairie Home Companion (broadcast in the UK and elsewhere as Garrison Keillor’s Radio Show).

Bibliophilia is on the up. Not just coffee table-books or sleb bios, nor even wall-to-wall right-on-ness. Just ordinary books and ordinary readers with, each year, more festivals to celebrate and sell them. So it’s hardly surprising that Edinburgh’s West Port Book Festival should be attracting the attention and accolades of the arty, the literati and the inevitable twitterati.

Walking back up the Royal Mile last night I noticed a man with a large blow-up spider on his head.  I don’t think anyone else did. It took me back to one night in the late 70s when I was a passenger in a slow-driving car riding around the city centre with my then BBC Radio London colleagues Mike Sparrow and Arena producer Nigel Finch (RIP both) and one other, quite possibly the comedy writer David McGillivray (mercifully still with us).

Relieved by tramworks of its normal job of snarling up Princes Street on the first Sunday of the festival, this year’s Festival Cavalcade was held in Holyrood Park - allegedly combined with an unsponsored Fringe Sunday which, if there, was so minimalistic that my friends and I failed to find it.

Question - where is it perfectly normal to see one woman with three exposed breasts and two heads, and another with a spare waving arm on a brass stick? Answer - at the press launch of the Edinburgh Fringe.