Winter Wonderland

It was a beautiful run up to Brecon on the bus today, like travelling through a Christmas card - though the bus driver said that there was no snow in Hereford at all.
I stopped by the Tourist Information office to pick up a bus timetable, as I'd lost my old one, and the lady there told me that she's been interviewed for Radio 4! As she works in the Tourist information office, she got the phone call to ask who they should interview about Hay when the Festival wasn't going on. She suggested Richard Booth, but they wanted someone else as well, and after talking to her a bit, the chap on the other end of the phone said "Don't bother thinking about anyone else - you can do it!" A lovely man in a pink turban came down (he's something to do with the One Show), with a sound man, and they chatted for about twenty minutes. "It'll be edited, of course," she said, "the programme's only half an hour." He asked her what she didn't like about Hay, and she said the fact that Hay has a Hereford postcode when it's in Wales, and that she didn't like the mispronunciation of some of the Welsh names, "like Heol-y-Dwr, that turns into Holy Door, and I told him, there's nothing Holy about it!"
She gave the BBC men some lunch, and a few days later, she got a beautiful bouquet, with a note thanking her for the lunch and the "lively interview".
The programme will be broadcast at 11am on Boxing Day, on Radio 4.
I had a few bits of Christmas shopping to do in Brecon (when a man says he wants cucumber seeds, and even goes so far as to state a preferred variety, that's what I'm going to get for him), and I slid into the empty front bar of the Boar's Head for a half of Welsh Pale Ale from the Breconshire Brewery - they had four Breconshire beers on tap, two of them CAMRA champion beers (Cribyn and Rambler's Ruin).
Back in Hay, there's a very impressive set of icicles on the porch of bwa design on Broad Street. The longest is over two feet long.