A few people have been asking Jason and Paddy about the origins of our mysterious blogger The Hat. The best we can do is tell you the following. Just before our first festival in 2011 the Man with No Name turned up on our doorstep. He was wearing that Hat and carrying a battered guitar case and a purring and paradiddling cat apparently called Cozy. To this day we don't know why he appeared at Festival Towers, where he came from or what he wanted. We couldn't offer him a gig or any money - or even a tin of cat food - but we gave him the one thing we had in abundance - some space on the Festival website. This turned out to be a smart move.

Since then, The Hat as he is now known, has entertained us locally, nationally and internationally with his irregular thoughts on the blues and how they interrupt his daily life, how they mess us up, how they make us laugh and cry and how they stick to us like gaffer tape. Informative and knowledgable, he gets it wrong and he gets it right. Sometimes we disagree and shout at his words but sometimes he seems to be looking over our shoulder and reading our mail and gets it spot on. If you have ever envied the brilliance of youth, tried to record your first CD or sat in a bar and argued about who is the best, The Hat was there before you with his loaded pen.

The one thing we all do everytime he breaks cover with one of his convoluted sentences and those Really Annoying capital letters, is laugh. Oh, how we laugh - at ourselves, at the posers, the penseurs and the pedants. He has made it Fun. We like that because that is exactly what we do at Festival HQ and what we want our festival to be known for.

So, we are sorry we can't tell you who he is or where he came from but we hope he and his cat hang around and keep us chuckling a while longer. You can always find him under his hat on our website.