Edinburgh Book festival 2010

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I come to my hometown on a sunny Tuesday - I come to be inspired, and it never disappoints. My theme is 'words' - perhaps oddly for a photographer? - and also fittingly I am covering the book festival.

I wrote back 2005 that Glasgow has so much music, but that Edinburgh has more stories, and it's as if they bubble up from the cobbled closes and the city of forgotten black spires, a hidden backdrop to those past stories.

Words and Folk nights Edinburgh! I had a bonny time at Edinburgh festival where character, poetry, art and music flourish for a few sunny weeks - actually it was freezing also in the press pod! I am incredibly proud of my book festival shoots - and such diverse, colourful and memorable figures from the worlds of Irish poetry, political thought, children's authors, dramatic thrillers, autobiographies and more - including Irish poet Seamus Heaney. This is the first serious portraits shots I've taken. www.pkimage.co.uk

Randomness on Tuesday. At the Book Festival I met my cousin, and an old school friend and was also greeted as a 'long lost friend' by a friend of the famous Irish poet Seamus Heaney, who seemed to mistake me for Seamus Heaney's wife, who was coming in behind me! You could feel the love. Check his new book 'The Human Chain.'

The Book festival is very much for families, the well manner educated set and the literary set who wear light coloured jackets and cream hats. I attended a talk on the importance of the 'story' with the challenge and the resolution - that help us to make sense of our very random existence.

Saturday. Melvyn Bragg's talk. He spoke of his interest in living poets and the merits of Popular Culture as opposed to high culture - and he said that he wondered why all the great artists had to be dead to be considered great.