Time travel was invented for festivals like How The Light Gets In (HTLGI). It's a maddeningly exciting place. Maddening because there's so much to see, hear, and taste, more than even the greediest of festival-goers could swallow, more than it seems possible to fit into one festival.

Can we separate thinking from being? I'd suggest that thinking, rational and irrational, is part of being, that thinking implies language, and that language is a primary instrument for giving expression to sensation and experience.

We often see this with readers who believe poets have hidden messages in their poems. This is the kind of reader who has been taught - often in school - that meaning is something that poets deliberately and sadistically withhold, and that what we have to do to the poem is ... batter a confession out of it.

Loneliness saps the will to live and can be a major cause of depression, as one 80-year-old lady told me "I wake each morning, get dressed, and sit on my bed waiting for death. I have nothing else to look forward to." ChildLine has proved, as Samaritans proved before it, that an anonymous helpline can break through the barriers of shame or fear. So I suggested that The Silver Line might do the same for the older generation, and enable callers to disclose not just their loneliness, but incidents of neglect and abuse they dared not admit to anyone else. And so it has proved.

The cover of the March edition of the Harvard Business Review confirms it all. An array of coloured fishing hooks dangle down to the caption: "Advertising that Works: How big data is transforming the art of persuasion."

The Great Gatsby is currently available in the UK in at least seven different editions, is about to appear in its sixth film adaptation, has been adapted on innumerable occasions for radio and theatre, even succeeding without adaptation as an eight-hour theatre reading, and has also been performed as a ballet, an opera and an orchestral suite.

For Man Like Me, finding direction is about the content of what gets laid down on the record. Take Squeeze, our current single. People say it's a song about sex or climax, but when I was writing it, it was more a case of looking for words to fill in the blanks and tell an unknown story, which would encourage our listeners to use their imagination.

HuffPost UK Culture is proud to announce our role as media partners at this year's HowTheLightGetsIn festival. Taking place over ten days in June i...