Late breakfast, the cat and bookmarks.

a. The 3BT event at Oxfam Bookfest was great (see below!). It was particularly reassuring to see so many familiar faces -- and I very much enjoyed telling people about 3BT. Perhaps some of them have wandered over today to see what the blog is all about. Also, I enjoyed encouraging people to write beautiful things on slips of paper and put them into books.  Plutarch has written his account of the event on Now's the Time.

b. I really liked this Guardian article about Tove Jansson, who created The Moomins. This sentence seems particularly 3BTish:

"A theme running through the Jansson family was to pay attention to things that were, in their opinion, beautiful," says Sophia. "A shell, a stone, a flower, a story."

1a. To see a familiar face when I first arrive: Sarah Salway has come with her two just-come-home children. "What can we do to help?" asks Rachel. She and Hugh fill in some bookmarks, and Sarah takes my picture.

1. He tells me that he is finding it hard to think of a beautiful thing so soon after a late breakfast. "Millionaire's breakfast," he says. "Smoked salmon with scrambled eggs and a coffee -- iced." He is wearing wrist bands for the Hop Farm Festival, and tells me that Bob Dylan is playing tonight.

2. She shows me her beautiful thing -- "Molly the cat is always so pleased to see me."

3. She smiles right back at me and says that she doesn't want to enter the children's bookmark competition (her sister is working on an intricate entry). She wants to look at the books. Once she has picked an armful of History Girls, she comes back and writes a beautiful thing on a bookmark -- "Somewhere to sit and read".

3a. I see on Facebook that Tim says he slipped his beautiful thing (which he wouldn't show to anyone) into a Gor book.