Hay Festival

 The Hay Festival programme is out online now, and I've been looking through it.

The printed catalogue usually takes a bit longer to come out, and they're trying to cut down on the quantities for sustainability - it uses a lot of paper.

The first thing I noticed is that I've never seen so many Doctor Who actors on the programme before!

Christopher Eccleston (9th Doctor) will be reading A Kestrel for a Knave for BBC radio, along with Alex Kingston (River Song) who is reading Frankenstein, Sacha Dhawan (the Master) reading 1984, and Reece Shearsmith (several Dr Who roles plus William Shakespeare and Furfur the demon in Good Omens) reading Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde.

Meanwhile Russell Tovey (War Between the Land and Sea) is talking about contemporary art for kids.

Juno Dawson, who has written for Doctor Who, will be in conversation with local drag queen Boo La Croux. 

Local personalities include Barbara Erskine talking about Lady of Hay, the book that started her successful career, and Derek Addyman and Anne Brichto are being interviewed about the history of Hay as a Book Town.  Catrin Nye, the daughter of my neighbour when I lived in Broad Street, is interviewing Claudia Hammond.  And the Hay Shantymen will be singing on the Festival site.  The Beefy Boys are doing some cooking events, too, and Lucky Seven Brewery will be providing the drinks for another foodie event with Wild by Nature and their charcuterie. 

The big names for the Festival this year are all women: Gisèle Pelicot, Malala Yousafzai, and Nazarin Zaghari-Ratcliffe.  

There are also local walks, tours of Hay Castle, children's authors like Cressida Cowell, archaeology with Alice Roberts, astronomy with Sheila Kanani, the MUBI cinema showing films ranging from Buster Keaton's The General to Bright Young Things to Orlando with Tilda Swanton, Natalie Haynes talking about Jason of the Argonauts and Medea, historians like Anthony Beevor and James Holland, and lots more.

Some of the events are already sold out. 

 

Improving Home and Garden

 It happened so gradually that I didn't notice, until my hands were almost under my chin to type!  My old office chair (which was being thrown out when I got it over ten years ago), was sinking slowly in the West - and the mechanism to make the seat higher again no longer works.

So it had to go.

I had an idea of what I wanted to replace it - not a modern office chair, but something vintage, and wooden.

I tried Fleur de Lys - I can usually get something good there - but they had no swivel chairs in stock at the moment.

So I tried the basement of Bain and Murrin - and there it was, right at the bottom of the stairs.  The perfect chair.  They even delivered for me.

 Meanwhile in the garden I was thinking that there were some spaces that needed to be filled up, so I went out to The Old Railway Line Garden Centre at Three Cocks on the bus.  I only had about an hour there before the bus back, so I needed to have a plan and not just wander round aimlessly.

I have loved magnolia bushes since I first saw one when I was eleven.  We were walking down to see a house my mum wanted to buy, and passed a garden when the bush was in full bloom, masses of cream flowers everywhere.  

As a teenager on holiday in Ireland, we went to Birr Castle.  The garden back then was still very much a family garden, and we met a lovely old lady pottering around with her gardening basket, who told us all about their wonderful magnolia bush.  We realised later that she was the Dowager Marchioness!

So I wanted a magnolia, and there were several to choose from. Initially I was going to go for a cream one, but there was a deep pink one called Emperor and since I had recently bought a plum tree called Czar, that was the one I went for.

[Edited to add: I have planted a monster!  When I read the label more carefully at home, I found it will grow to 5 metres high!] 

The weather was not pleasant, so I cut it rather fine in getting back to the bus stop.  In fact, as I trundled my trolley out of the garden centre, I could see the bus pulling into the layby, and had to make a dash for it.  Fortunately, the bus was five minutes early, so had to wait there, and I needn't have panicked!

Back in Hay, I had time to go up to the market - sadly depleted because of the weather.  The lovely plant lady was there, though - and she had a cream flowered magnolia.  Well, why shouldn't I have two magnolias?  This one is stellata, and doesn't grow very big. 

New Book of Poetry

 A lady called Tammy Allen recently joined the Hay Writers' Circle, and she's just had a book of poetry published.

The book is called Roots, and it's published by The Conrad Press.  Tammy is a Mental Health Counsellor from the Swansea Valley, and the poems deal with her experiences of loss, grief, healing and acceptance in the face of adversity.  Each poem is illustrated by Sion Rees.

Borderlines Film Festival

 The Borderlines Film Festival began on 6th March, and there are several films being shown in Hay.

I'm afraid I missed the first weekend of films - Booth's Bookshop Cinema was showing No Other Choice, a South Korean film about a man who goes for a job and decides to get rid of his rivals, Resurrection, a Chinese sort of time travel film spanning a century of Chinese history, and Nouvelle Vague, a French film re-imagining the making of Jean-Luc Godard's film A bout de souffle - the original film is also being shown in Ludlow and Hereford.

Coming up on Friday 13th is The Last Viking, a Danish crime comedy starring Mads Mikkelsen, and on Saturday 14th is The Stranger, a French adaptation of the Albert Camus novel.

All sorts of other films are showing across Herefordshire - it's a pity I can't get to Malvern or Hereford (well, I can get there - it's getting home that's the problem!) to see The Testament of Ann Lee, founder of the Shakers, a religious sect that started in Manchester.  There's also H is for Hawk, and Zootropolis 2, which shows something of the wide variety of films on offer.

There are also films about Palestine. All That's Left of You follows three generations of a Palestinian family from 1948 to the near present, one is set in 1936 when the Palestinians rose up against British rule, and The Voice of Hind Rajab, is about the little girl who was killed by Israeli forces in 2024, along with everyone else in the car with her, and the ambulance crew sent to rescue her. 

 

Hay Castle on TV

 Sky History at 9pm tonight - the programme is called Great British Castle Rescue, and Hay Castle features in the first episode.  As far as I can see, all the castles in the series were helped by National Lottery money, which is why Hay Castle has been letting visitors in for free if they have a lottery ticket this week (normally it's £7.50, but the ticket lasts for a year).

Flora of Brecknockshire

 Compiling a complete record of the flora of the local area has been literally a life time's work.

Mike Porter, the Recorder for the county for the British Botanical Society of Britain and Ireland, started collecting information for the book soon after he got the job in 1968.  In 2013, John Crellin joined him as co-Recorder, and started to help him with the book in 2021.  Sadly, Mike died last year, but by then most of the main text was complete, and John Crellin brought it to publication.  

There's a lot of diversity of habitats in the area, with mountains, moorlands, woodland, limestone pavements, and the largest lake in South Wales.  The book is hardback, with over 1100 distribution maps of the different species.  It's been illustrated by the wonderful local artist Meg Stevens - she did the most marvellous landscapes of the local area, often from a vantage point low down among the wildflowers.  I could never afford one of her paintings, but I do still have some of her greetings cards (which she kindly signed for me).

Not only does the book have the flora of the present day, but Mike Porter went back into the records as far as 1666, also incorporating the work of Victorian naturalists, especially Augustin Ley, vicar of Sellack in Herefordshire.

The book is available for pre-order now, at a discount price of £35, from Summerfield Books, www.summerfieldbooks.com  The publication date is 1st April, at which time the cover price of £40 will be charged, and there will be a press launch at the Bannau Brycheiniog Visitor Centre on 9th April.

The Brecknock Botany Group has a blog at https://floralimages.blogspot.com/ and it's well worth a visit or two. 

Cash Machine Back

 Someone said on Facebook that the cash machine in the craft centre is working again, so I checked this morning, and it is.  The toilets are still closed, however.

According to the Powys County Times, NoteMachine, the owners of the cash machine, had to order a new security door for the machine - and it took between six to eight weeks to be delivered!