Books and beyond

We got down to the festival site early as we had tickets for Ehud Barak at 10am and security was going to be tight. Managed some tea and toast and said hi to L, who was feeding the ducks when we left. The weather was not looking good but we got in without getting wet and had coffee before queuing.

Ehud Barak was very good. He is in his late seventies but looks in excellent shape and - with a distinguished military career and a failed left wing leadership behind him - is an unusual character in Israeli political circles. He was very critical of the current government’s intractable hawkish stance and said that it was part of a resurgence of right wing politics across the world which we all had a duty to resist; a supporter of the two state solution he was clear that looking for a peaceful and honourable outcome for both Israel and Palestine was the only way forward. Difficult to dislike at least in the broad brush, not least because he once went into combat dressed as a woman (true story).

We had an excellent vegan cheese pizza and chips for lunch then went our separate ways. I slept through most of a lecture on quantum mechanics. It had seemed like a good idea at the time of booking. When one of the questions is about the transition of an electron during its binary phase between downward and upward spin and why this is not observable without the 3D glasses you nicked from your last trip to the local Odeon, then you know you are out of your league.

The next session was better and was about how we measure GDP and happiness whilst accounting properly for the impact on the environment and other things less tangible than pound signs. It wasn’t riveting but it had its moments and I did stay awake this time.

My third session was a discussion about our digital future with (amongst others) Matthew Hancock, Tory Boy Secretary of State for digital, culture, media, sport and the wobbly bits on porn stars and pantomime cows or something like that. He is a typically aspiring good looking young right winger who turned up in jeans and with a faintly dismissive air about him but a rather obvious attitude of collaboration. Apparently he is the only MP to have his own app but it allegedly contravened GDPR regulations when first issued. I told him NHS IT was shite and asked if his cabinet colleagues shared his enthusiasm for a digital revolution. He assured me that they did and that he and Jeremy Hunt were working on a new version of the ZX81 for rollout across all NHS platforms.

Reassured, I met TSM and sat in the sun (which had miraculously appeared out of nowhere) and got slightly drunk. In fact it was really pleasantly hot and we had a rather nice chilled out time before going back up into Hay. Bizarrely we got into conversation with some strangers on the bus and found that all four of them lived within a mile of us back in Surrey. Next year we’re going to make it a charabanc outing.

Bad meal in The Granary. Had fond memories of this place from years back but it was truly awful. The manageress was dreadfully apologetic and almost in tears at one point, saying it was a family place and that she had even been born upstairs but that they were ‘having issues in the kitchen’. I felt sorry for her but she insisted on giving us our money back.

Outside, there was a big issue seller was wearing a sheeps head on his groin and saying the magazine was a "baaaagain" but I didn’t find this very persuasive. A local shop owner came out and gave him the most enormous bar of Dairy Milk (I presume in the hope that it would shut him up).

We did a couple of bookshops in a half hearted way then went back to the festival site to see David Baddiel who was doing a show about his family. This was unlike any stand up I’d seen before; in fact it wasn’t really stand up at all but a tragi-comic account of his parents bizarre lifestyle and legacy, a hysterically funny chest baring gallop through dysfunctional family complete with running gags about inverted commas, infidelity and pipe smoking. I won’t spoil it for you, it is different, shocking - and I mean jaw-droppingly so - but also hugely funny and honest, and a must-see.

Another great day. We did buy some books but this went way beyond the printed word. It’s certainly not just a literary festival anymore ...