It's the year of Seamus Heaney at Hay-on-Wye, in Wales, where Louise East pitches her tent for the annual literary fest and feast.
The Hay Festival is a particularly fine spot for ear-wigging. Within five minutes of installing myself in a festival deckchair (rather temptingly printed with the old Penguin cover of Raymond Chandler's The Big Sleep), I learn that Alan Yentob's book is going very well, that Will Self is furious, and that Zadie Smith's favourite word is "risotto".
"Only at Hay", is a phrase you hear frequently in the small Welsh town of Hay-on-Wye (population 1,400, number of book shops, 41) during the 10 days of festival. Founded in 1988, one of its founding legends is playwright Arthur Miller's response on being asked to headline in 1989: "Hay-on-Wye?" he reputedly queried. "Is that some kind of sandwich?"
Over the years, almost every contemporary writer has made the trek to Hay. Two years ago, the big coup was John Updike and in recent years, non-writers Bill Clinton (who dubbed it the Woodstock of the mind), Paul McCartney, Jane Fonda have pulled the crowds. This year though, the festival is being billed as "the year Seamus Heaney came to Hay".
This year it occupies its biggest ever site - 20 acres - compared with 13 last year, and box office takings are said to be up 25 per cent. Before the festival closes, each person who performs there will be handed one of 450 cream Vendela roses.Beds in Hay this weather are rarer than hen's teeth, with some hotels boasting a waiting list of three years. I solved the problem with a tent pitched by the river, from where the emerald green lights of the festival can be seen shooting into the sky, son et lumière style.
Rain had been forecast, and enough of it arrived on day one to turn the festival site, a white, tented city nestling in the foothills of the Black Mountains, into a brick-red mud bath. Vendors of wellington boots did a roaring trade. Poet John Fuller gloomily noted that it had been the wettest spring since 1773. I crossed my fingers and hoped I could blame my slightly fusty aroma on the quantity of wet sheep in the surrounding fields.
But on day two, the sun came out and people took to the deckchairs to eat cherries and swap anecdotes from the day's readings and talks.
Did you hear AA Gill's aphorism: "A prejudice is just a fact you haven't proved yet"? Or that Vernon God Little author DBC Pierre describes himself as a "Russian composer trapped in a cartoonist's body"?
The actor Michael Gambon had clearly assigned himself the role of festival jester, turning up at David Hare's talk to ask, "David, do you know Diana Rigg?" (to which Hare intriguingly replied, "Not as well as you, Michael").
Despite the diversity of the speakers, ideas and themes recurred and unsurprisingly America loomed large. Historian Simon Schama, described his recent book Rough Crossing as "an account of the post-split custody battles of America and England", while David Hare pointed out that to a playwright, the Iraq conflict has all the innate tension of a Shakespearean tragedy: "When people say one thing, and have quite different intentions, a gap opens up."
Even Seamus Heaney got in on the act, describing his sonnet sequence, The Tollund Man in Springtime as "My Al Gore sequence", a reference to the famous Democrat who was introducing his film on climate change, An Incovenient Truth, the next night.
The subject of writers and writing was much touched upon, so much so that one could almost put together a dictionary definition of what a writer is, based on 2006's Hay Festival.
The American novelist, Jane Smiley, declared that writers were people who held strong convictions - and who had the courage or egotism to change their convictions with gusto. Author Will Self suggested writers had all experienced an early electrical response to reading, in his own case to Lewis Carroll's Alice in Wonderland.
David Hare surmised that all playwrights come to a sticky end, recalling his old friend, Tennessee Williams "waxing, long and lyrical, but particularly long" on his own declining reputation.
But if ideas are the meat of the Hay Festival, then the gravy is the parties.
On Saturday night, Germaine Greer, actress Sheila Hancock and philosopher AC Grayling all snuck off to Gifford's Circus, a traditional sawdust and spangles affair across the river. Margaret Atwood paid a visit the next night.
At a huge pile in Hereford, the champagne flowed and a never-ceasing stream of sushi, beef carpaccio, and Lilliputian ice-creams was served to guests including broadcaster John Snow, Labour peer and former head of Faber, Mathew Evans; novelist Joanna Trollope and screen writer Andrew Davies.
At Hay Castle the next night, it was Channel 4's turn to host the party; DBC Pierre and Canongate's Jamie Byng stormed the dancefloor there. At the poetry gala on site, the audience tried to work out what the collective noun for poets should be. A body of poets? A sequence? Heaney, Atwood, James Fenton, Don Paterson and Hugo Williams did the honours there.
This weekend, the hot tickets are Peter Carey, Salman Rushdie, and Wexford's own Eoin Colfer. M*A*S*H* fans will be queueing up for tonight's talk by Alan Alda and eco-warriors will tune into Gaia theorist, James Lovelock.
Tomorrow, novelist Monica Ali and journalist John Pilger will both be celebrating new books; Vikram Seth talks on memoir, and playwright Michael Frayn discusses the strain of having two writers in the family with his daughter, Rebecca.
Just don't forget to pack your wellies and your sun screen. Making Hay is an unpredictable affair.
The Hay Festival ends tomorrow