Well, the first Stratford Writers Festival kicks off tonight, Friday, and goes through until Sunday with workshops and open mic sessions.

It’s good to see Reg Mitchell (we co-founded, with Ian Harris, The Bird of Prey Theatre Company back in 1998), is involved, along with Paul Edmondson, who is Head of Education at the Shakespeare Birthplace Trust here in Stratford, who once put his blossoming career on the line by appearing in a play of mine back in the ’90s.

I’m also rather chuffed to see that another actor, Peter Cubitt (he played Walt Whitman in my first production of Ancient Pinnacles), will be reading some of his poetry during the festival. Now Peter is a very fine actor and, having read some of his poetry recently, he’s also a very fine poet who I hope to publish in the future. I’m looking forward to hearing him read on Saturday evening at the White Swan Hotel.

I wish the event well, especially as one of their main sponsors, Maher the Bookseller, has just closed its Stratford branch. My only concern is that The Stratford Observer has described the event as being organized “…by writers for writers…” which could put off a potentially large non-writing book-buying audience.

My own observations are that literary festivals are always better attended than writing festivals, and get better national and international coverage; you only have to think of Cheltenham to get my point.

Stratford does need a good literary festival. Maybe this is the start of one?

All of last week I was in Lancashire with Hilary, which was superb for many reasons, not least that I was able to concentrate on getting a fair bit of work done away from the distractions of those 3.5 million visitors to this lovely town of Stratford, discover the delights of Preston, which included finding a market stuffed full of second-hand book stalls - which was quite a distraction - a superb Waterstones where I bought George Melly’s Slowing Down, plus The Winter Soldiers, by Garry Douglas Kilworth, which is one of his series of ‘Fancy Jack’ Crossman Crimean War adventures (more of Mr Kilworth later), and Alan Whicker’s Whicker’s War.

I started reading all three in the Caffé Nero afterwards and again became quite distracted because all three books are superb, plus the coffee in the Nero is some of the best you’ll find anywhere, which means that Stratford should have one. Please.

It was also quite a distraction ear-wigging other peoples conversations too…

” Used to be a butchers when I were a lad.”

” What did, dad?”

” This place.”

” Are you sure?”

” Aye. Mind, that were afore all these mobile phones.”

” Oh, do you want a bit o’ cake or something?”

” Lovely. Don’t believe in ‘em.”

” What?”

” Mobile phones.”

” Why?”

” Well, who is there to talk to?”

” What sort of cake?”

” Chorley.”

” Don’t reckon they have Chorley cake, dad.”

” Do they not?”

” No. But they’ve got some nice cheese cake mind.”

Which they had.

So quite a few distractions, but I still managed to get some work done…some.

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I know the idea that William Shakespeare spent his so-called ‘lost years’ at Hoghton Tower in Preston - just up the road from where I’m writing this - doesn’t go down too well with some Shakespearean scholars, although they seem unable to come up with an alternative explanation as to why, just after the birth of his twins, the young Bill should suddenly walk out on his wife and disappear for seven years (seven years!), reappearing in London in1592 a fully accomplished, yet somewhat upstartish, playwright and poet. And I’m sure it wasn’t the noise of the kids keeping him awake at night that made him do it.

But go missing he did, or at least for those - especially strangers - who asked after him in those dark and dangerous times when Elizabeth I was becoming increasingly paranoid about her safety, especially, as she saw it, from an increasingly large and scheming bunch of Roman Catholics who wanted her dead. And let’s not forget that Shakespeare’s father, John, knew most of the men who would later metamorphose into Gunpowder Plotters who very nearly blew Elizabeth’s successor to kingdom come.

The information that has been passed down, initially from John Aubrey, and then again in 1937, when a Stratford antiques and book dealer by the name of Oliver Baker, brought the Aubrey story back into the light, is that the young William Shakespeare had to flee Stratford as a result of poaching deer on the Charlecote estate of Thomas Lucy and, through the good offices of one of his former school masters at Stratford, John Cottom (a Lancashire man), was given refuge at Hoghton Tower, the home of Thomas Hoghton, and given employment as a servant-cum-schoolteacher. Which seems to me to have been a rather extreme thing to have done just for the crime of poaching a deer, the punishment for which would probably have been a bit of a roughing-up by a couple of Lucy’s men, no more.

The point is you don’t send a son away - especially one who has twins on his hands - for seven years unless there’s a very good reason. And the reason is that Stratford was at heart a Roman Catholic town (a town that was also part of the Protestant diocese of Worcester), with John Shakespeare a recusant who, nevertheless, as an alderman of the town (and a man fearful for his neck) tried desperately to make the town appear on the surface (he even white-washed out the very Catholic wall paintings in the Guild Chapel) to be a good Protestant town.

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