September brings one reluctantly down to earth. A gentle easing in is how I decided to do it via the FT Weekend Festival at Kenwood House. Nothing too heavy would do for the moment I decided. Not for me ‘So what does the FT really think?’ or Deborah Meaden on ‘Questions and business pitches at the ready?’. Not even ‘BREAKING NEWS on the FT Festival line-up! William J Burns, Director of the US Central Intelligence Agency and Richard Moore, Chief of UK Secret Intelligence Service’ – appearing together for the first time ever at a public event.

An Uber deposited me at the gates of Kenwood on Saturday morning and not long after I took my seat, zen-like, artisan coffee in hand, for my first speaker of choice – John Lithgow.

The lady next to me was on my wavelength: “Yes, I’m doing the same – going lite today” she told me.
I mentioned my itinerary which included ’50 Years of Disco’.
“That’s on my list too” she said. “I wonder when that starts from exactly?”
“I’m sure they’ll tell us – but it’s got to be before 1974?”

John’s mellifluous tones washed over me pleasantly: “Roald Dahl”…”The Royal Court”, and on 3rd Rock from the Sun: “The most fun you could possibly imagine: When does that happen now? .. It’s a milder drink.”

“What about Dahl’s antisemitism though?” Janine Gibson asked.
“Well, the play’s about the difficult and thorny issue of any person creating art” he replied.
Janine persisted on the same theme.
“You know, he struck me as an outsider wanting in – that heartburn in a person’s nature can be grounds for something else developing” JL replied.

Notions I’d had of side stepping the big stuff were showing signs of fading.

I moved on and had another go: ‘Yes, Ma’am’ should do it I figured. Craig Brown, author of ‘A Voyage Around the Queen, a portrait like no other of the late sovereign’ took us through a not insignificant number of anecdotes from his biography.

I chuckled at Craig’s theory that she had thought the British public quite deranged as everyone seemed to do “crazy things” around her. He recounted a story where Phil Collins, on meeting the late Queen at Buckingham Palace, after answering the requisite questions started to hum the theme tune to Close Encounters of the Third Kind. As she continued down the line, a mortified Phil coming to his senses turned to Sir Terry Wogan next to him. “Don’t worry” Sir Tel told him, “It’s the Royal Effect.”

“When the Queen died, it was a profound time – properly profound.” Craig finished, reminding us of that week just two years ago when everything seemed to stop.

Nostalgia-tinged now to boot, I tried ’50 Years of Disco’. There was no consenus on the official ‘start’ date of disco, however the panel agreed on the effect: dance music as a portal to somewhere else. And then, they mentioned Disco Demolition Night at Comiskey Park, Chicago in 1979.

Well, if this was how things were going to be, I was going to have to face summer’s departure head on.

A bluey greenish dragonfly almost as big as a bird hummed above Wes Streeting’s head in the Big Ideas tent. They’ve been everywhere this summer I thought, sunlit scenes flitting through my mind of the various places and events where I’d noticed them soar in previous months.

“No member of the Tory party went to work wanting to cause child poverty” Wes told us, “but the ideological predisposition of Tories caused child poverty to grow.” He went on to talk destructive class inequality, and how Labour’s new working-class cabinet would ‘bear fruit.’

I glanced upwards, no sign of the dragonfly. His or her 360 laser vision had seen enough, perhaps deciding it was time to migrate to warmer climes, or maybe, just maybe winging its way back to the nearest Hampstead pond to breed.