The Fowey Festival does not do things by halves. By the time I arrived at my first event of the day, the morning had already delivered what everyone I spoke to was calling a highlight of the entire programme. Paul de Zulueta and Rupert Tower, grandsons of Daphne du Maurier, had taken to the stage for a session that those who were there couldn't stop talking about. I'd missed it, caught out by a schedule so rich it demands military planning. Note to self, and to anyone coming next year: map your day out carefully.

My afternoon began at two o'clock with Mark Kermode and his co-author Jenny Nelson, in conversation with Petroc Trelawny about their book Surround Sound: The Stories of Movie Music. If you have ever been undone by a John Williams overture or found Vangelis's Blade Runner soundtrack as listenable away from the screen as with it, this is the book for you, and this was the session for you.

Petroc Trelawny was the ideal guide for a topic so vast and so deep it could easily have become overwhelming. He facilitated the conversation beautifully, giving it shape and accessibility without ever flattening its complexity. It was an audience member who drew out one of the session's most enjoyable moments, asking each author for a favourite score. The answers were telling. Jenny chose Blade Runner, praising it as an album that stands entirely on its own terms. Kermode's choices were characteristically wide-ranging: Eiko Ishibashi's score for Drive My Car, Peter Schickele's Silent Running, and Angelo Badalamenti's extraordinary Fire Walk With Me. Between them the conversation swept from John Williams to The Buggles, mapping a musical landscape as vast and surprising as cinema itself.

The book grew out of Kermode's decade-long attempt to make sense of his love of film and his growing understanding that much of it came down to the music. He was unequivocal about one thing: without Jenny Nelson, it would not exist. She produced his film music show on Scala Radio for five years and brought exactly the depth and discipline the project needed. The partnership was palpable in the room.

Hitchcock's shower scene in Psycho, Kermode reminded us, was originally planned without any music at all. Bernard Herrmann's strings didn't accompany that scene; they created it. Then came a compelling argument for Britain's unique place in film music history. It was no coincidence, Kermode suggested, that when the BBC sold Maida Vale studios, Hans Zimmer was the buyer. Abbey Road remains the recording destination of choice for the world's greatest scores, and the reason is simple: British session musicians are in a category of their own. Many will sight-read a score at the session, encountering it for the first time, and still deliver a final take in one performance. It is that human intelligence, that instinctive musicianship, that adds layers no technology can replicate. AI, Kermode was clear, cannot touch it.

Between sessions, we popped down to John's for a glass of rosé and found ourselves, almost immediately, in conversation with two sets of visitors, comparing notes on what they were heading to, what we'd already seen, what had stayed with us. It is exactly this kind of moment that defines the Fowey Festival. This is not an event that happens in a town. It is an event that becomes the town, weaving itself into every wine bar, every gallery, every chance encounter, until the line between festival and place dissolves entirely. Fowey's particular gift is intimacy, and the festival knows exactly how to wear it.

By four o'clock the Town Hall had filled again, another full house, for Iain Dale in conversation with Dr Sian Williams about her Sunday Times bestselling book The Power of Anxiety: How to Ride the Worry Wave. What began as an interview became something I hadn't anticipated. Gradually, almost imperceptibly, the atmosphere shifted. The audience didn't disappear exactly, but they seemed to recede, until what was happening on that stage felt less like a public event and more like something private, a conversation so personal and so sensitively held that the room became a part of it.

The book's central proposition is both simple and maybe counterintuitive: anxiety is not the enemy. With a Professional Doctorate in Counselling Psychology and four decades as one of Britain's most trusted broadcasters, Dr Sian Williams brings rare authority to that argument. Sensitivity, she contends, is a strength, and learning to listen to our anxiety rather than silence it is where real change begins.

The session was filled with warmth and, at times, with tears. Dr Williams spoke of her former BBC Breakfast co-presenter Bill Turnbull with a fondness so palpable it seemed to settle over the whole room. Dale, in turn, shared stories of callers to his show who had reached out in their most vulnerable moments, people who had trusted him with things they may never have said aloud before. The weight of those connections was still clearly with him. Nobody in the room seemed unmoved.

Two sessions, two hours apart, a glass of rosé in between. One about the music that gets inside us. One about learning to live with what we feel. Both, in their very different ways, speak about the irreplaceable value of the human touch. The Fowey Festival, at its very best.

The Fowey Festival runs until 9th May - you can find the full programme on the LoveFowey What's On page, or on the festival website. Tickets are available online or from the Festival Box Office, located alongside the Waterstones Festival Bookshop at the Royal Fowey Yacht Club.