Hay-making

Please excuse lack of comments, at the end of each day we are cultured out coupled with meeting up with all my Welsh family and now on to our fourth set of “digs’ because during the festival accommodation is at a premium and we are literally living out of a suitcase.
 
Back to Hay this afternoon for two very different speakers historian and biographer Antonia Fraser.
She came over as a very feisty octogenarian who kept correcting her interviewer Simon Jenkins and insisting frequently that she did not come from a privileged background despite being the daughter of Lord Longford, an Oxford don, and member of the Labour cabinet.
She insisted her childhood was ordinary though not by the standards we consider ordinary.
 
Meanwhile Helen MacDonald ‘s memoir H is for Hawk of how she trained a young goshawk combined two very different narrative strands.
It is both a natural history tale and her own grief at dealing with her father’s death.
 
 
 
It says something about this powerful story that MacDonald was able to attract an audience of 1200.
 For we can all identify with grief.