"Arghh! Where are you?!"

"I'm at the meeting place, at the escalators, like we arranged. Where are you?"

"I don't know!"

"Are you in the station?"

"Yes! I can see a Burger King."

"Ok, wait there, I'll come find you. See you in two minutes."

I don't know why Mum and I had bothered to arrange a meeting point the night before as I knew that as soon as she arrived at Piccadilly Station she would get into a panic and phone me. I spotted her looking anxiously around and glancing at her watch. When she caught sight of me she gave an excited wave and hurried over to pull me into a hug.

"Hi! Ooh I'm excited!" she said. "What platform is it? Have you got the tickets?"

We were going to the Edinburgh Book Festival and were rather excited, in a geeky, bookish sort of way. We made our way over to platform 13, which was a long walk because, as Bill Bryson mentions in Notes from a Small Island (unnecessary and pretentious quotation of the modern authors is all the rage at these things), it is actually in another county, and boarded the overcrowded train to Edinburgh.

"Did you bring the picnic?" I asked Mum once we'd found our seats, which thankfully weren't in the same carriage as the hen party.

"I did," she said, pulling out two bananas, a Capri Sun carton drink, and a packet of cigarettes. "Can't smoke these in here though, have to wait till we get there. God, I haven't been on a train in years!"

The delicious and nutritious picnic that was to sustain us throughout the four-hour journey.

Edinburgh was wet and grey when we arrived but there was something in the damp air that said the city was excited; the Book Festival was confined to one site in Charlotte Square but the Fringe had spread itself out in every direction.

We trundled through the rain to the B&B, which had this lounge

and these books.

I would have been happy to spend the evening ensconced in one of the luxuriously deep and squishy couches nosing through the encylopaedias and wishing I lived here but instead we headed straight out to the festival.

Mum and I have been to a few book festivals together and one striking point of note is that there's always a lot of very posh people with their very posh, overly privileged offspring.

"Mummy, may I go to the Freedom-of-Expression-Through-Interpretive-Dance and Young-Pampered-Poets' Workshop? Oh please, Mummy!"

"Not right now, Timothy darling, come and finish your brie-and-seedless-grape wheat-free organic pannini whilst Papa and I sip this carafe of '87 Chateau d'Yquem before the afternoon readings."

It rather gets up the nose after a while and it is grating to see these self-important upperclass types swanning about, their well-behaved and good-looking infants dressed in Baby Oshkosh fairtrade cotton being carried behind by their eastern-European nanny.

I was standing in the queue in the cafe (called "The Cafe", which was next to "The Bookshop"; not very inspiring considering these are meant to be the literati) listening to a man with an Eton accent explaining to his sympathetic friend why he's glad that this festival isn't any bigger as he just can't bear the crowds; "I mean, the carnival in Brazil just isn't the same any more, it's absolutely overrun, it really is. I used to go every year but I just don't anymore because I can't cope, I absolutely can't cope. It's just too much."

His friend nodded along in agreement whilst I thought about stabbing the Eton chappie in the eye with an environmentally friendly wooden cake fork to see if he could cope with that.

Around the festival site were several pieces of large art, which I didn't really understand, even after reading the label.

Is what?

Wonky Shed: A post-modern, pseudo-idealistic socio-politico contemporary figurative juxtaposed representative metaphorical expression of the degradation of the gardening classes.

.
And these bins, which were a bit German.

The main reason we were at this festival was to see Terry Pratchett, of whom Mum is an especially big fan and owns at least two copies of all his books. Two years ago we were at the Hay Festival in Wales; we were about to go into a talk by Margaret Atwood when we spotted a miniscule sign that announced in very small writing "Today, Extra Event: Terry Pratchett".

Apparently they do not usually put him in the programme as it otherwise turns into a Pratchett Festival but if he turns up they'll squeeze him in. We therefore immediately turned around and hurried back to the box office where we, sorry Margaret, exchanged our tickets and spent the rest of the day feeling particularly chuffed.

My lovely mama, waiting to see Terry (I can call him Terry, I've met him twice).

This time he talked about his forthcoming book, Nation, and was generally entertaining and witty, and a bit pervy, and gave a lively and interesting talk. It was, however, rather marred by the fact that I couldn't take my eyes off the bloke chairing the session, for he absolutely could not sit still. He was a nervous wreck and was constantly touching his hair, scratching his head, crossing and uncrossing his legs, adjusting his collar, sitting up in his chair, rubbing his arm, checking his watch, wringing his hands, and generally displaying an unceasing array of agitated movement for the entire hour. Terry Pratchett didn't seem to notice.

Afterwards he did a signing session in The Cafe. Our usual technique at book signings is to go last, which allows for a bit more conversation with the author as there is no impatient huffing and puffing issuing from the queue behind.

However, in this particular case there were two million people in the queue and we had to catch our train back to Manchester in four hours so we joined the masses.

We got progressively excited as we neared the front and eventually it was our turn to step up to the table. He looked up with a friendly smile.

"Ah. Hello!" we said.

"Hello!" he replied. "Oh! Are you the lady with the black boots?" he asked, turning to me.

Oh my god, I thought. He remembers me! He remembers me from the book signing in Hay!

"Yes!" I cried, looking excitedly at Mum and then down at my boots, only narrowly resisting the urge to hoist one leg up on to the desk to present the evidence. "Yes, I am! That's me!"

"Ah good. I picked you out as a marker in the queue; I'm just seeing how long it's taking people to get round." He took our books, signed them, and handed them back with another smile.

We made our way outside and wiled away the rest of the afternoon discussing what a thoroughly nice chap he is and wondering who'll be at the Hay Festival in May.

We were on our way out and had just about made it to the exit when, I couldn't help it, I rushed back to The Bookshop and bought twelve books. They were a bugger to drag back to Deutschland the following day but surely worth it.