I got home yesterday just in time to read my 4 year old a book before turning his lights out. As I lay down I realised I stunk of smoke and my eyes were watering.

I’d not seen him in the morning as I’d been called out to the fire at the Bluecoat. When I arrived the fire brigade had been there two hours already and while the fire was not raging it had got in between the floors and was flaring up in different areas. The fire crews were putting on breathing equipment, picking up axes and disappearing into the building to replace the teams coming out whose faces were blackened with smoke.

The Bluecoat was packed for the Orange Prize reader’s day. A whole bunch of women writers – Bel Mooney, Katte Mosse, Lionel Shriver, Philippa Gregory, plus the judges Shami Chakrabarti and Clare Allen – came to the Bluecoat to talk about their work.

The day started with all the writers on a panel and then the audience split up into groups and dispersed to different rooms around the building to work with one of the authors.

Yoko Ono was remarkable. As I watched her perform I thought how she was the same age as my mother and my mother hadn’t done things like that in the 1960s let alone in her sixties and Yoko is actually 75. She bent herself in all sorts of shapes to ‘find her relationship’ with a metal chair and then took a break and showed lots of film of her at the Bluecoat in 1967 and then bits with her and John all the while sitting on stage knitting. The ending was her getting everyone up on stage dancing along to an extended remix of ‘Give peace a chance’. I think you had to be there and I was pleased I had been.

Yoko Ono is in town this week and playing the Bluecoat tomorrow.

The Yoko experience has panned out much as we thought it would with the media being very interested in her and this has brought a lot of attention to us but it has been hard to get them beyond her to the other artists.

Tickets for her gig sold out in minutes and Yoko agreed a couple of days ago to a live feed for the event going into the Bluecoat hub and the big screen in the city centre. There is now a lot of work to do on this very quickly and we will see if we can get a webcast too while setting up the feed.