So it’s off to the Troubadour – the Old Brompton Road venue where the brisket is served in a bun and the waiters dress like extras in The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou – for the semi-annual turn of the agenting supergroup Editörial Standards. It does beg the question why these road-and-rights warriors add organising and playing a gig in the same week that they have hundreds of back-to-back 30-minute meetings (not all agencies have gone over to the Curtis Brown “tight 15s”), but then jazz does strange things to stranger people. Plus, the great and the good stopped by: Charlie Campbell and Natalie Galustian – to support fellow Greyhounder Sam Edenborough – Nicola Barr, Emily Hayward-Whitlock and even Booker royalty with the magnificently-coiffed Paul Lynch hanging on every note. It could very well have been one of these folk, or someone else in the crowd, whom I heard mutter, “Man, Liane-Louise is really carrying these guys”.

Then back to Olympia to have a sip of Sangiovese with Alessandro Gallenzi and Elisabetta Minervini to ring in  Alma Book’s 20th anniversary on the stand of another plucky indie publisher, Bloomsbury. The late, great John Calder was the subject of several anecdotes, with Gallenzi relating that when Alma bought Calder’s list, they were in the venerable publisher’s rather chaotic Paris apartment and there on a chair under a mountain of dusty detritus Gallenzi discovered an unreleased manuscript by Louis-Ferdinand Céline. “Oh, I’ve been looking for that,” Calder exclaimed. (Celine, at this point, had been dead for some 55 years, so Calder may have been searching for a while.)

The week has brought us an inevitable trade-show staple: publishing publishing itself. The latest sees Harvill’s Katie Ellis-Brown and publicist supremo Becky Hunter joining forces to write fantasy for the most powerful person in the industry: Natasha Bardon. Cue the usual thing that happens when one of our own is acquired by one of our own: wild and vastly inflated rumours (“I hear its a seven-figure advance for Serbo-Croat rights alone”; “Really? Well, I heard Charlie Redmayne flew his brother Eddie in to help with the pitch, and Katie and Becky are now going to star in Day of the Jackal season two”), followed by wondering why it couldn’t have been you and the misty-eyed contemplation of what level advance would you settle for to chuck in the day job for the unalloyed riches of authorship.

Fantasy and romance aside, it has been nice to see all the non-fiction doing well at this LBF, but that the bulk of the hot titles seem to be histories of fascism, books on combating climate change and how Silicon Valley is going to kill us all suggests we may end up reading these by candlelight in our bunkers hiding out from Elon’s AI-murderbots.

And, of course, the hottest fiction at this LBF was the organisers’ contention that all was well in the IRC. Dearie me, is that the time? Ol’ Horace needs to be in Bologna, like, tomorrow. Arrivederci!