Lots of things going on in Hay!

What a Busy day it's been!

I started off by visiting the car boot sale at the school, and I have to admit that I was expecting about half a dozen stalls, and be round and out in about five minutes.
It's huge! The cars cover the entire school grounds, with a wide variety of stalls. It's not just families trying to get rid of out grown children's toys, or knick nacks they don't want to dust any more. There were fishing rods, and fresh veg, and brass door knobs, and all sorts of general stuff as well. I came away with a pair of boots and some linen trousers and some pot plants. The school gets some of the profits, and WyeLocal, which organises it, gets the rest.

Then I loaded Islay into her trolley and wheeled her up to the Buttermarket and Castle Street for the Transition Towns event. Castle Street was closed off, with Isis cafe expanding into the street, under a canopy, and the outdoor pursuits shop displaying canoes in the street, and children throwing rings at traffic cones at the other end. There were other children cycling up and down as part of a cycling proficiency day, and round the square there were wood burning stoves, and wind turbines, and electric cars, and a little stall doing art where you squirt paint onto a disc that's revolving (I remember doing that, on an old record turntable, in the early seventies). The Young Farmers were cooking burgers, and Drovers Holidays were maintaining bikes. In the Buttermarket there was a quiz about food miles, and children's art, and the winners and runners up of the short story competition (some of which were very funny). There were scale models of barn conversions from a company based in Llanigon, at www.co2dl.co.uk (CO2 Designs for Life), and information about Transition Towns and the 350 campaign (with a ladder to illustrate where the CO2 emissions are now, and where they should be for a sustainable Earth). Hayfields Garden, the community garden project, were there too, with some of their produce. They're running an Introduction to Permaculture course on the 6th and 7th of November, with talks, discussions, workshops, observation walks, slide shows and practical demonstrations! Contact hayfieldgarden@gmail.com for further details.

In the afternoon, I was out again with Islay in her chariot (with a new sign on the side in honour of the day saying: "Alternative Transport - green, carbon neutral, organic, no added nuts*)
*well, apart from the nut pushing the thing!
We went up to Kilverts for the beer festival - 50 Welsh real ales in a marquee in the garden, with another marquee for talks.
It was just what I needed, a really relaxing afternoon, sipping good ale and reading the Hereford Hopvine (from the local CAMRA group) and a copy of Permaculture I picked up from the Hayfields Garden stand.
Early on in the afternoon, I saw Richie rushing round frantically, rounding up some American visitors - and Jackie, his wife. He'd got George, our new town cryer, to announce Jackie's brand new British citizenship outside the front of the pub! George finished his announcement with the traditional God Save the Prince of Wales, and the Queen - "and God help her husband Richie!"
At somewhere around 4pm Pete Brown gave a talk, matching beers to books - his books, since he has written a trilogy of beer related books almost without meaning to ("what about my great novel?" he keeps asking his agent). And very well chosen they were too. Man Walks into a Pub started off as an exploration of great lager adverts and morphed while he was writing it into a history of beer with a few lager adverts tacked onto the end. For this we tasted Tudor brewery's Blorenge, which is lager like "but with taste", for those lager drinkers who are dimly aware that there is something more interesting out there but don't really know where to start. The other beer we tasted, to illustrate the Industrial Revolution, was Facers North Star Porter.
For his travel book, Three Sheets to the Wind, we tried Otley's O Garden (a pun on the Belgian beer Hoegaarten) and Breconshire Green Dragon, made with green hops - so green that they were on the vine four and a half hours before they went into the beer. The chief brewer of Breconshire Brewery was there to confirm this - and there were a couple of chaps from the Otley Brewery there too.
The third book is Hops and Glory, another travel book in which he takes a barrel of India Pale Ale from Burton-on-Trent to India by the original route around Cape Horn, or as near as you can manage it without the tea clippers these days. We were running out of time now, so only had one beer to taste - the only IPA on the beer festival's list, Kingstone brewery's Humpty's Fuddle, which had a lot more taste going on in the glass than most big brewery IPAs, and is believed to be closer to the original IPAs that did make the trip to India in the days of the Empire.
It was all great fun, and towards the end of the afternoon I noticed a few of the Sealed Knot re-enactors arriving, who will be doing drill (if they can find the space) tomorrow.
And Islay made friends with Captain, Pete Brown's little grey mop of a dog.