Despite an utterly sleepless night on Saturday — for its cause see below — I was up and off the next morning for a wonderful day at The Independent Woodstock Literary Festival. This unmissable event — most of which I had, in fact, missed through being abroad — offers a thrilling engagement between top writers and their readers in an incomparably lovely location. Just as organiser Sally Dunsmore has obtained the setting — Christ Church — for the festival she began and continues to mastermind in Oxford, so, too, for Woodstock, her more recent addition to the lit-fest calendar, nothing could improve on Blenheim Palace as focus for the action.

I love Woodstock. I lived there in 1973 during my first couple of months on this newspaper in a seriously haunted house. I will not reveal its location for fear of putting the wind up its present occupants, if — as seems unlikely — the wind has not been put up them already.

Not the least of the town’s attractions was a splendid variety of places at which to enjoy a drink. My favourites were Hook Norton Brewery’s Queen’s Own, always known as the Tuppenny Tube, and the buttery bar at the Bear Hotel. Both are sadly now no more.

The hotel itself, of course, still exists and is, after Blenheim, Woodstock’s most famous building. There were allusions to it from both of the speakers I heard during the day on Sunday.

Lady Antonia Fraser, in her talk about Must You Go?, detailing her life with Harold Pinter, recalled staying there with him the day after their wedding in November 1989. She described walking through a Blenheim Park covered in snow and “looking like a scene by Brueghel”.

Colin Dexter revealed he planned to have two people bumped off there in an early book. Fearing damage to the hotel’s reputation, the publishers said he’d better change it.

Later, of course, Colin was to be much less concerned about the collateral damage caused by his fiction. As he said on Sunday: “I have made Oxford the murder capital of the European Common Market.” The death toll from 33 episodes of Morse on ITV stood at 91. It continues to mount as a consequence of the follow-up series, Lewis.

Speaking of the sergeant, now inspector, Colin described how he had once been asked during a public appearance to discuss the word ‘psychic’. After some minutes struggling to do this, the famously hard-of-hearing author discovered the word had actually been ‘sidekick’.

Laughter was rarely far from our lips during Colin’s festival talk, which was sponsored by The Oxford Times. He had no book to ‘plug’ but was there in an appearance to mark both his 80th birthday and the 35th anniversary of his first Morse book, Last Bus to Woodstock. I read this soon after publication, discovering the same enjoyment in it as I derived from all the books that followed. This makes the series unique for me, all other practitioners of modern detective fiction — including Mankell, James, Kellerman and Cornwell — having in my opinion lost the plot, so to speak, later in their careers.

Colin’s masterly way with an anecdote suggests he might very easily have triumphed as a writer of comedy. I loved his account — delivered with perfect timing — of the least welcome letter he had ever received. It read: “We are holding our village garden fete on the 24th of June. I have been casting around — rather desperately — for some minor county celebrity to come and open it. Please do reply as soon as possible.” Colin added: “It would not surprise you to know that on the 24th of June I was extremely busy.”

On Sunday evening, Rosemarie and I were privileged to be invited — as guests of Sally Dunsmore — to the closing festival dinner in The Orangery at which Sir Max Hastings delivered a stirring and well-judged tribute to a man forever associated with Blenheim, Sir Winston Churchill.

The food and wine was of the highest order — noisettes of lamb to die for, as many lambs had — and a credit to the palace catering team under head chef Billy Bush.