Heard at Hay Festival

 I'd booked a ticket to the very first event at Hay Festival - well, the very first for adults.  The lady introducing the event said that there had been eight thousand kids from schools who had been bussed in for the day, and there would be a similar number of older children on the Friday.

They were trying a new format for talks.  Normally, three guests would sit on stage, and be given prompting questions by the moderator, to get a discussion going.  This time, though, after an introduction by Simon Armitage (who also read one of his poems, about a late library book), each guest got up to give a mini lecture, after which there was time for a few questions.

Tony Robinson said that he had been expecting the first type of event, but he gave a very good talk anyway about what history is, and how all the writers of history have had an agenda that you need to know something about before you take their account at face value.

Katherine Rundell talked about the importance of encouraging critical thinking in young people in a time of AI that pretty much agreed with everything you said and gave inaccurate information.  She's done a lot of work in schools, so she's seen changes as pupils start to rely on ChatGPT and the like.

Dallas Campbell started by saying he'd been going to talk about one thing, but had been inspired by the previous speakers to talk about something completely different!  He's interested in space archaeology, and talked about moon regolith and how it can be used to make all sorts of useful things, from cinder blocks to build Moon habitats for astronauts, to silicon chips.  He had also brought along Neil Armstrong's space suit - well, not really Neil Armstrong's space suit ("that's behind bullet proof glass at the Smithsonian!") but the space suit that had been made for Ryan Gosling for a film where he played Neil Armstrong.  Which is nearly as good!

  After the talk, I went to the food tent for some delicious Tibetan curry.

This meant that I passed the BBC Marquee on my way home, just at the moment when several different breeds of sheep were lining up, with their handlers holding leashes, to process up the aisle to the stage!

And then they turned round and came out again!
 

Bizarrely, the music they walked in to was the House of the Rising Sun!

I have no idea which BBC programme this was for - it wasn't up on BBC Sounds when I went to look.