Today's progamme marks the end of the Durham Book Festival with a strong poetic offering in the Palace Green Library. Sinead Morrissey is this year's Festival Laureate and what a star she is. A power-house of such intensely lyrical poetry that seems to strip its subjects naked left the audience in slightly stunned wonder. Her long and insightful writing, delivered from heart was clearly the best performance of the entire festival's poetry programme and I think Durham's best laureate to date. If you get the slightest chance of seeing her, take it. I certainly intend to. A super end to another great festival from Durham.

LAST WINTER

was not like last winter, we said, when winter had ground its iron teeth in earnest: Befast colder than Moscow and a total lunar eclipse hanging its Chinese lantern over the solstice. Last winter we wore jackets into November and lost our gloves, geraniums persisted, our new pot-bellied stove sat unlit night after night and inside our lungs and throats, embedded in our cells, viruses churned out relaxed, unkillable replicas of themselves in the friendlier temperatures. Our son went under. We'd lie awake not touching, and listen to him cough. He couldn't walk for weakness in the morning. Thoracic, the passages and hallways in our house got stopped with what we would not say-- how, on our wedding day, we'd all at once felt shy to be alone together, back from the cacophony in my tiny, quiet flat and surrounded by flowers.