But this time I've finally made it, and you can be sure I'll resist very strongly any plans that take me from home over the last weekend of May in future years!

I invited my eldest sister down and booked tickets for the two of us for Katherine Whitehorn and Tom Fleming. The former has always been such an icon for people of my generation, and she continues to be. She was promoting her autobiography that was serialised recently on Radio 4. At 82, she's as clear, as positive and as self-deprecatingly amusing in the flesh as she is in print.

The sustaining of her faith in herself and in her career by the men in her life – father, brother and husband Gavin Lyall – was a recurrent theme. Nowhere did she indulge in any kind of "how difficult things were" for her as a young woman breaking into a male province. It never occurred to her, she said, that she couldn't do the things she wanted to do – so she went ahead and did them.

Tom Fleming is not a writer, but an actor, probably the most distinguished Scots actor of his generation – and he, too, is in his eighties.

He has made recordings of the wonderful Lorimer translation of the Bible into Scots and gave us readings from each of the four gospels. How much more immediate they sound in Scots, which gives them an earthy humour which the beautiful, sonorous language of the Authorised Version misses. Thus, "Ye cannot serve God and Mammon" becomes "Ye cannae serve God and gowd". When Jesus speaks of the lilies of the field, Lorimer gives us "Solomon wasnae buskit half sae braw", and the man who finds his lost sheep tells his neighbours, "We'll hae a spree".

The knight and I were back at the book festival again on Saturday and Sunday for two political talks – Ming Campbell, also publicising his autobiography, and Douglas Hurd, the former foreign secretary. The latter, of course, was a writer before he became a politician, with a few novels to his credit.

This, however, was a biography of Robert Peel, the 19th-century politician who invented the police force and did so much else to improve the wheels of justice in England and Wales. He was also responsible for repealing the Corn Laws which led to vilification by his contemporaries.

He was, said Douglas Hurd, not afraid of policy U-turns if the facts before him warranted this. A fascinating talk – I must read the book!

When Alistair Moffat first started the book festival I wondered whether it was wise to hold it in Melrose during festival week there.

Actually it works a treat. The speakers and audiences for the book festival come from far and wide and they find the town busked with flags and are conscious of bands and other activities in the background.