The Aardvark Blog

Vide Grenier, H.Art and onwards
28/08/2014

Still can't quite think how we managed to make it through the last weekend - for a small team running two events at the same time is somewhat crazy - but I am delighted to say that all went reasonably smoothly.

Mary Berry was her usual charming self, and happily signed autographs and books for an hour each time after her performances. Always incredibly professional and extremely polite, at one point she even volunteered to walk one of the organiser's dog for him. So much for the diva temperament. How nice it is to find that at least some of one's heros do not have feet of clay.

Then as the Flavours of Herefordshire continued, it was back to the bookshop for me to prepare for Monday's Vide Grenier. Notwithstanding the fact that it rained throughout the day, a good day was had by all and most of the stall holders departed happily. We had a cracking day in the Cafe and ran out of almost everything by the end of the day. Special thanks to Elliot and Lettie who worked like trojans in the kitchen.

Now the weekend is over our attention moves on to the opening of our H.Art exhibition on t he 6th of September, and beyond that to the Ludlow Festival and the Frankfurt Bookfair. I am really excited about our double exhibition for H.Art this year and have been planning the logistics of showing art in a much larger space.

We have nearly finished making arrangments for this year's Frankfurt, and will again be selling books to German visiters which we enjoy. This year following Edward's death we will be flying in and out, and it will take a little longer before the first books start to appear in  the shop.

At this year's Ludlow Foodfair we have the excitement of signing books with Tim Anderson the winner of Masterchef in 2011. Nanban his new book on Japanese food publishes in October, but the publisher are kindly making available some advance copies for us to sell at the fair,