Four seasons in one day

Our morning started lazily and bucolically with escaped sheep wandering around the airbnb garden and L’s cats demanding to be fed. Just like being at home (apart from the sheep). Then we suddenly realised that our first event was at 10.00, not 11.30, so showered quickly and drove into the festival site. I say showered quickly. In my case it was more comically as I was unable to control the temperature, pulled one of the knobs off, and was forced to squeeze my 6’3" frame into a cubicle designed for Peter Dinklage. I ended up doing my ablutions on my knees and stayed there even for the cleaning of the teeth, which actually made me laugh out loud when I saw myself in the mirror.

When we first went to Hay over twenty years ago it was on the site of the local primary school and had three stages. Now it is enormous, on a site outside the town that seems to be dedicated to the purpose and is big enough to get lost and disoriented in. The crowds are a little intimidating but it is well organised, provisioned and stewarded.

We saw Luke Harding talking to Nick Gowing about his investigative journalism into the Trump-Russia affair (resulting in the book "Collusion"), which was a barnstormer of a conversation. Top class journalists are formidable intellects and these two produced a tour de force. The audience questions were also very good. Bottom line: they don’t come much more horny, corrupt and aggressive than Trump and his cohorts and the Mueller investigation is digging downwards from the tip of a thirty year old Kremlin floated iceberg. And if it doesn’t have the right outcome it will be bad for America and bad for the truth.

We then saw Bethan Hughes talking about her book Istanbul: A Tale of Three Cities. I’m finally getting to the end of this, it’s a huge and detailed read that I’ve been plugging away at for months. The author is a bit of a telly personality as well as a very serious historian, not that I’ve seen anything of hers, and is arguably (to a small degree) to history writing what Nigella Lawson is to food (an observation not of her but of the way professional women are often packaged up for public consumption). I loved Istanbul and she really got under the skin of it, particularly its very long history of cosmopolitan tolerance towards people of different races and religions and its ability to challenge authority. She also described a strong element of the feminine, of pioneering women who led social change at different times.

Lunch in the festival food hall was rather good. Vegan street food. And we sat in deckchairs then ran for cover when it rained.

Next up was Andrew Davies who, with two other members of his production team, talked about the creative process involved in turning famous fictional works into small screen masterpieces. This is the man who got Colin Firth‘s Darcy wet so that Jennifer Ehle could shag him both on screen and in real life, and also scripted one of my favourite programmes of the nineties A Very Peculiar Practice. It wasn’t well chaired but it was very good, and despite his age Mr D is still doing his best to embrace modernity. They are just finishing Les Miserables before moving on to John Updike and Vikram Seth. Life in the old screenwriter yet. He vows not to die before racking up a decent amount of mileage on his new car.

After that we went into the town itself and went back to Sartori where we had bought our wedding rings over twenty years before. The owner claimed to remember us. I bought an oil burner but decided against getting any Chrystals to balance my chakra and we went for a beer instead, sitting in a tiny courtyard garden behind a bottle shop where we made a whole new bunch of friends who got me drunk and tried to persuade us to buy a house in their street. They had a very big dog that was half Labrador, half poodle and half horse. Then we went to some bookshops where I got an essential guide to Jung’s theory of archetypes. That always seems to happen to me when I get drunk at literary festivals. Then we walked back down to the festival site and I got a bit more drunk, and then we went to see Simon Schama who did an amazing hour of rock and roll history, pacing the stage with a glass of wine in his hand telling jokes and describing the history of the Jews over 600 hundred years. Awesome.

Then we met a Welsh couple and a young woman from London and got chatting and they got me drunk and then we went to see Jeremy Hardy who was mostly funny.

Then it was really late so we ate pop chips and ginger biscuits whilst queueing to get out of the car park and came home.

Great, great day.