Thursday (as I knew it - tell me what I missed!)

My day began in a small classroom of the Mercantile Seamen’s Training Institute where, ironically, I was to run a writing workshop for thirty teenagers. One of the students of the Institute, who’d been instructed to scrub the whiteboards extra clean for us, was pleasantly intrigued by the Festival’s invasion and wanted to know more about it. My Sinhala isn’t as literary as I’d like it to be but I conveyed it was all about writing. Quite possibly I then confused the matter by running a very noisy and active workshop immediately afterwards as we all moved around the room creating stories out of thin air. Counting our characters, there must have been a good seventy of us crowded into the room (directly outside was a small, quiet cove to bring the contrast home).

When we emerged we discovered we hadn’t been the only group making a big noise. Several excited people told me I’d ‘missed a fiery morning’ at the session discussing the Gratiaen Prize (controversy was inevitable then whether the poor Gratiaen Prize wanted it or not?). But now the afternoon’s sessions were already upon us and soon I was up on the high high Maritime Museum stage with fellow theatre folk, then rushing to the bijoux Galle Fort Library for a reflective Creative Writing Workshop with Shyam Selvadurai. Fifteen of us sat around a small pot of synthetic flowers on an old wooden table as Shyam quietly encouraged us through exercises and ideas. This was definitely the calm after a storming first day.

Coming out of the workshop I bumped into a friend and persuaded her she was dressed quite perfectly for the evening’s cocktail party and should come and have a quick restorative drink with me instead of rushing back to her hotel to change (she was understandably none too pleased when after the drink I decided to slip into my guesthouse and a sari). But before long we were all barefoot on the cool white floors of Orchard House, with fruity arrack concoctions in hand.