by Sonja Bettina Klein
“What are you all doing here?” was the question Stuart Campbell posed at the beginning of his reading at the West Port Book Festival today. Within seconds he had the audience on his side, with his jokes and self-deprecation.
Stuart Campbell is the author of the book Boswell’s Bus Pass that tells of Campbell’s tour following Dr Johnson’s and Boswell’s journey 238 years ago. Together with a group of, as he explained, “equally eccentric and badly behaved companions” Campbell encountered odd guest book entries and stories that you can only experience on this type of journey.
“Clearly, Scotland is an army of eccentrics,” Campbell said, and listening to his work, this seemed to be only too true. The audience laughed, having been prepared for a report of an unusual journey. What came was a reading of extracts of a book that made the audience laugh nearly non-stop.
Although the audience was mainly comprised of the more mature reader, Campbell fascinated all of them, and most bought the book at the end of the reading.
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