This year I'm attending literary festivals in King's Sutton and Wigan, but my festival debut was at another event as a 'local author.' I'll save everyone's blushes by not saying which one, but here, gentle reader, is a description of the experience.

The thing on the man’s head was ginger and shaped like an aerodynamic cycle helmet.

I think it was real hair cut and dyed by a sadist so that it looked like a wig. Whatever, the corners of its owner’s face were buttressed by a pair of white sideburns. I can’t remember the man’s shirt, but his flared trousers were made from an off-cream Denim-like material and flapped over a pair of white, lace up sports shoes. He was reading from his self-published children’s book; a ghost story.

“Whoooo!” said the man, making a palsied, jiggling hand gesture as he described a phantom “that looked like it was wearing a sheet over its head.”

Like me, he was a ‘local author,’ making a ten minute literary festival pitch, which in his case had lasted about half an hour.

What was I doing with him? I’m a freelance journalist and my day job is writing about cars. My work gets into the national press and various old car magazines, and I regard myself as a journeyman hack. My wife and I keep a few hens, and as a joke I wrote a book about them called ‘Hen and the Art of Chicken Maintenance.’ A peon to sex, death and domestic fowl, it had been a successful piece of niche publishing. Now I’d authored something called ‘Write On!’ intended to show how journalistic techniques can be used to write anything.

That book wasn’t going to get newspaper reviews, so I’d decided it wouldn’t hurt do a little DIY promotion by making my literary festival debut. How wrong I was.

The posse of authors of which I was a member was clearly appearing at this event under sufferance. They included a retired mental hospital arts therapist who’d written some rather good looking history books, a session musician with some stories he’d created for his children, a World War 2 mariner and a lot of people who seemed to have found God.

We had been shunted into the corner of a snooker hall that had once been a theatre. It had a bar along one wall and the stage at its far end. Painted a sort of 1970’s turd brown, it stank of stale beer, and at 10.30 on a Saturday morning was populated by mottled blokes sinking pints of larger, and a bull necked, shaven-headed man spoon feeding a slot machine with money and shouting into his mobile phone.

A few pale girls with floating, diaphanous clothing and plastic badges indicating that they were festival staff, drifted about, giving off vibes of low level embarrassment. I asked one what was supposed to be happening and was told that she didn’t know, as this get together was being organised by one of the writers. The implicit message was; ‘We’re here to look after Tony Benn, Virginia Ironside and John Humphreys. Famous people we’ve invited. Unlike you.”

Our talks were supposed to have happened in a grim anti-room that resembled a crematorium chapel, but since we didn’t have much of an audience and were doomed to talk almost exclusively to each other, we decided to do them in the space where we were all failing to sell our books.

Events kicked off with an old boy who’d authored something with a title like; ‘What On Earth’s Wrong With Things These Days?

He mumbled that Waterstones wouldn’t stock it. When my turn came about three people had drifted in who looked as if they might be festival goers. They contemplated me without obvious enthusiasm.

Most of my fellow speakers clearly hadn’t thought about what they would say and had issues with projecting their voices, so were barely audible. This wasn’t helped by the shaven headed slot machine addict, who beeped away, and whose deafening ringtone played Colonel Bogey. He had very good projection and engaged in staccato phone conversations that went: “Yeah? Yeah? You What? No, Darren, no mate.”

The last speaker was a short, resolutely chirpy woman in her fifties, with a sunny smile and an aura of permanent rage.                                                                                                                           

She was, she said, a Christian playwright and had written a musical which transferred the parable of the Good Samaritan to a pub. She told us with gimlet-eyed brightness that a modern Good Samaritan could be “a hoodie, a drug user or a Muslim,” then added; “but when we did the play in 2001 the cast decided he would be French –because the accent was easier.” Why not a drug taking, French Muslim hoodie?” Best not to ask.

She was then joined by the ginger bloke and another chunky gentleman. Clasping empty beer glasses they launched into an extract, exchanging dialogue that made The Archers sound like Pinter.

Then a man with receding hair and staring eyes bounded onto the stage. Somebody had been to Woolworth’s and bought the Christian playwright a keyboard with a drum machine that went ‘umpty-plunk, umpty-plunk’ to accompany a thin, electric piano melody.

The cast burst into song, making strange, sideways fist gestures, as if they were auditioning as extras in a hellish production of ‘Oklahoma!’

‘This is getting surreal,’ said the ex-music therapist, as the bulgy-eyed man put on a sort of American accent and bellowed:

‘I don’t care for God!

And I don’t care for Man!

Just as long as I make as much moneee

As I jolly well can!’

It was four in the afternoon when I finally packed up and went home. I’d sold two books, one of them to the woman sitting next to me.

I’ve mentally expunged the name of the musical, but ‘God Help Us’ would have been entirely appropriate.