Well that's it all over! Saturday at Callander was great, it was nice to hear Richie McCaffery read again and another Happenstance poet, Margaret Christie. The Filmpoem sequence was excellent, great film and photography work by Alistair Cook with poems by Morgan Downie, Elizabeth Rimmer, Andrew Philip, Jo Bell and many others. Many of the films are available to watch freely on the Filmpoem website, well worth checking out. I really enjoyed readings from the Split Screen poems too, a brilliant anthology of 72 commissioned poems based on film and tv. Sally's appearance with her makeshift Yoda hat as she read Colin Will's Yoda poem The last of the little green men was priceless! I sold enough pamphlets to buy myself a copy of the Split Screen anthology and grab a Burger King on the road home, so that wasn't too shabby either!

Then on the Sunday, Donald S. Murray arrived in town and came to dinner so we had a lovely evening chatting to him. A genuinely really lovely guy, it was such a pleasure to meet him and hear him talk about his writing. And it's such a small world that it turns out that as well as other family connections, Donald used to hang around with one of my uncles when they were young, they even shared a flat together in Glasgow! I tagged along while he read some of his work and talked to the Gaelic and English students at the local secondary school and then had the privilege to read alongside him in the evening to a small but friendly audience. It's the first time I've read my own work in Dunoon so that's a milestone crossed! I've done a write-up of the event for the local paper and I'm hoping, through it to make contact with any other like-minded poetry people in the community and raise interest for possible future poetry events.