Pam Ayres made my day at the Wigtown Book Festival

Who knows what the hell is going on here, but who cares? If raw street theatre came with an explanator it would ruin the fun.

Two elderly locals have a go anyway: “There’s a dancer tryin’ to be a tree here.” In his Gallovidian dialect ‘dancer’ is pronounced ‘dawncer’.

A few minutes later, as I’m looking for the pop-up bar, I overhear two gents talking about Dougie Donnelly, the kenspeckle former BBC Scotland sports presenter.

On hearing that the estimable Mr Donnelly is appearing at the Wigtown Book Festival, one of them says: “Ah’d be richt keen fur ga’an tae see Dougie.” I’ve been in this town for barely 24 hours and have begun to fall in love with the pitch and fade of this lovely, old vernacular.

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It acts as a lyrical counter-balance to my low flat glottal Glaswegianisms. An hour earlier, I’d been in the packed upper room of the County Buildings to hear the portrait artist, Juano Diaz read from his memoir, Slum Boy about the challenges of growing up gay, adopted, gypsy and Catholic in 1960s Glasgow and facing down a suite of profound childhood traumas.

It’s not exactly the sort of event I’d normally be attending, but if you restrict yourself only to those that make you feel safe and warm then you’ve kinda missed the point.

Mr Diaz is a spellbinding interviewee and not once is there a hint of self-pity or judgment about all the adults whose own afflictions and bad choices had stalked his childhood: only love, pity and mercy. I will buy this book.

It’s easy to be cynical about the rise of the rural literary festival in Scotland over the last 20 years or so.

You’d imagined these to be the redoubt of the pony-tail and the red corduroy trousers where packs of chin-strokers strolled around hands clasped behind their backs and brows permanently furrowed as though contemplating the place of oat milk in the known universe.

My disinclination for these events is probably rooted in the trauma of having attended a few at the Edinburgh International Book Festival when I worked in the shortbread city. It seemed then that the main purpose was to be seen there.

Once, at an event with Howard Jacobsen, a man-bunned fool declaimed loftily about how important it was to build “a narrative structure”.

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Mr Jacobsen, as politely and kindly as he could, replied that he often didn’t have a clue where his books were heading when he started writing them. I applauded heartily at this and was cut down by a firing squad of 100 New Town stares.

After a day and night in Wigtown though, my jaundice is receding rapidly. I’m introduced to Sarah P Corbett who will soon be appearing on stage with Natalie Bennett, the former Green Party leader.

Ms Corbett is a globally recognised environmental activist who has developed the art of the ‘gentle protest’.

As we chat about dialects and our childhoods – mine in Glasgow hers in Liverpool (Evertonian, by the way) and about England and Scottish independence it begins to dawn on me that I should probably know her.

I discover later that she might just beone of the most influential people I’ve ever met. Not once in our conversation though, did she offer a hint of her achievements. I resolve to get out more often. And to read more books. Speak to people. “This is Wigtown,” says Ms Corbett. “There’s no hierarchy here and no superstars. Everyone gets treated the same and this informs the entire atmosphere.” She’s a ‘craftivist’. I’m vaguely aware of what that is, but I must find out more. Another of my tawdry preconceptions dismantled.

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I encounter Adrian Turpin, my fondly-remembered former newspaper colleague. Mr Turpin has successfully turned his life around since leaving newspapers and is the only one of our kind I know to have been given a bauble from the British Empire.

He has been Director of the Wigtown Book Festival for 18 years and, with a small but passionately committed team of staff and volunteers has made this place shimmy and swing. In his welcoming speech he talks of the challenges facing the Wigtown festival: “We’ve faced attacks on sponsorship from people protesting in ways which I find quite puzzling. We currently have no certainty on financial support.

We don’t yet know if we will have a financial settlement next year from creative Scotland. We don’t know what money the Scottish Government will give to the arts.”

In my lazy, misconceived analysis of arts funding, it’s too easy to cite the horror-shows that Creative Scotland have chosen to fund in recent years as emblematic of a runaway cartel of chi-chi virtue-signallers indulging their own concealed proclivities.

Then you come to Wigtown and discover what having a book festival which has grown slowly and organically over more than two decades has brought to a region largely unloved and neglected by civic Scotland.

Kay Christie’s family have been embedded in Galloway for several generations. In our afternoon peregrination through this town it seems that she’s either related to or otherwise connected to every second soul she meets.

The townsfolk probably weren’t quite sure what to make of this travelling circus of bibliophiles and literary savants pitching up every year and ruffling its douce rectitude, but they’ve embraced it now. Perhaps ‘embraced’ is the wrong word.

This is Galloway, after all. They nod their heads and smile quietly at it.

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“I don’t see what’s not to like,” says Ms Christie. “I only see positives. In a place like this, you always have to travel to places like Glasgw or Edinburgh if you want to see big ticket arts and cultural events, yet there are just as many people here who love politics and history and literature as anywhere else. The great joy of this festival is that the circus is coming to us.

“We like showing this place off and there’s a lot to show off. We all love coming to the events and seeing who we can see. There are no large population centres near here, so often you don’t get to see close friends and families for months at a time. You have to make a lot of effort and make a lot of time to organise social events.”

Her friends Liz and Robin and Lynne and Karen are holding court in Scotland’s most remarkable pop-up tavern, just behind the County Buildings.

It’s a large house owned by Martyn Toon who, for the duration of the festival decants all his furniture to a local farm and replaces them with pub tables. All the food and drink he sells in what is usually his main living-room is sourced locally.

Across the road and up the street, there’s another pop-up business called Bladnoch Botanics, selling lotions and hand-creams.

They offer me some samples but my skin is long past the salvation of such unguents. The thousands of visitors who will descend on Wigtown this week is a good test-bed for the seeds of this new business.

There are seven permanent bookshops in Wigtown, the first of which was The Bookshop, still owned and operated by Shaun Bythell after 23 years.

This is the bookshop on which all others ought to be modelled. It’s where JR Hartley would have found his book about fly-fishing in the famous Yellow Pages advert.

Mr Bythell’s best-selling Diary of a Bookseller is based on his experiences here. Today, he’s trying to find a suitably ancient prop for the television interview that’s happening downstairs with the antiques presenter, James Braxton.

He tells me that part of the success of this event is on including local people and being aware of customs, habits and challenges. “We don’t want this to be a prissy, high-brow literary event. It needs to be accessible to everyone and that means being prepared to listen and to communicate properly.”

On every corner, the talk is of Pam Ayres who brought the tent down on Friday night. Just knowing that Ms Ayres is still reading her poetry in sold-out venues has made this trip worthwhile.