Alexei Sayle, Nick Srnicek, Meg Rosoff, Paul Mason, Dangerous Women: Isabelle Grey, Elizabeth Buchan and Kate Williams

AYE Write’s second weekend was dominated by The Voice. Mercifully, though, not the TV show kind but the writerly kind, both authorial and narrative. I suspect only Alexei Sayle, pictured, could have read aloud his memoir, Thatcher Stole My Trousers, in the style of a Pythonesque Brian Blessed and produced something so hilarious. He was refreshingly different, too, in locating his own style of humour.

“Most comics’ desire to make people laugh comes from a needy place,” he said, “I didn’t have that, I wanted the audience to hate me (but laugh as well). I never wanted that feeling of cosiness.”

He might have left Glasgow disappointed then – we all so clearly loved him.

I would have liked Glasgow to show a little more love to the superb Meg Rosoff, who had a shamefully small audience. Astonishing, when her million best seller How I Live Now had such an impact on the Young Adult writing world. Her voice is never less than mesmerising and proved to be so here, as she talked frankly about her own inability to “fit in”, on indeterminate gender (“I mean, look at me!”) and not knowing what that was back in her youth when she was twenty-something, working in advertising in New York, and getting fired every eighteen months. It was a magical session, intimate and rewarding, and more should have caught it.

Perhaps everyone was too busy looking forward to a firebrand-like Saturday night with Paul Mason and Nick Srnicek, one of the best discussions of this festival, as both men talked about their visions of a socialist utopia, their response to what is heading our way fast.

Some of it is already here, of course, like automated cars and unpaid work (Wikipedia, we’re looking at you), and their suggestion of a future that doesn’t exploit but rather uses certain advances to free up leisure time, to give us all a basic income co we can choose what to do, doesn’t seem so outlandish when you consider, as Mason suggested, that “third age”, the long period of retirement when so many will never be working again. Our identity is so tied to what we do, that the rethinking involved will be huge. But technology is driving it, whether we like it or not. I haven’t stopped thinking about their suggestions since and I suspect that’s true of many others who heard two very different voices, one impassioned and youthful, the other more experienced but no less committed.

I would have liked the voices of the “dangerous women” of the session, elegantly chaired by Isabelle Grey, to have been just a little more, well, dangerous, as both Elizabeth Buchan and Kate Williams, experts in their fields though they are, gave us rather familiar accounts of the women in their books from the two World Wars. We’ve seen a lot about the Bletchley women on TV recently, and I’m not sure what extra information Williams could really give us about the “flapper”.