The Festival Buzz

It's taken a few days to work up to it, but there's definitely that Festival buzz around town now. There are crowds everywhere - the Festival site is packed out; people walking up and down Brecon Road in a solid line, and crowds spilling out into the roads all over Hay.
It's also stopped raining.
Practicalities first - I needed to go to the launderette, and I found the electricians in there when I arrived, wiring in a new big washing machine in the gap where the non-working machine used to be. So now there are 4 normal sized machines, and 2 big ones that take duvets (but not horse blankets - only in Hay would you need to put that notice up!)
On the way home, I ran into Jean Miller. She was just about to throw away some French sticks and chicken pate, and asked me if I'd like them, so they wouldn't go to waste. It's rather more expensive chicken pate than I would normally buy, too.
I was just in time to go to a creative writing workshop at the Library, part of the Fringe events, and I came out bouncing. I learned a lot, and the other people there liked what I wrote - which was a great relief, because when I arrived I wanted to crawl under the table. The others were so much more high powered than me! One of them teaches scriptwriting - and what we were doing was writing a dramatic monologue, so he had a bit of a headstart over me.
Jane rang me up last night to tell me about the workshop. She'd just been to the performance of a dramatic monologue that the teachers had done last night - she wrote it and he performed it, and it was very interesting to have an actor's point of view on the work.
When I saw Jane this morning, she was just about to dash off to grab a bite to eat and then change into her Morris Dancing costume to perform up at the Castle with Foxwhelp Morris (named after a cider apple).
In the afternoon, I was at the Chamber of Commerce stand again. We ran through a box full of the Festival booklets in about an hour, and then had none left apart from the stall copy - which they would have to prise from my cold, dead fingers! Fortunately, some more arrived from the Tourist Information office later, but there aren't many left. I got very used to saying "I'm sorry, I'm not the Festival; I'm the Town - I don't know how long the performance will last, or anything about the Green Room... but the toilets are that way, and the Barclay Wealth Pavilion is that way.... Buses to Hereford? (Hollow laughter) It's Bank Holiday, so there is one bus into Hereford now, and it goes at ten past six. No, the shuttle bus is just to go around Hay - it doesn't go all the way to Hereford. No, no extra buses have been put on for the Festival - they don't care about how green the Festival is trying to be."
It is trying to be Green, too. There's a very good display of the lower carbon home, showing all the ways a normal house can save energy and water and so on, and Solar Aid is there, with solar panels for third world countries, and the rubbish bins are all labelled for different sorts of waste - plastic, paper, tins....
I came back from the Festival site, past gardens full of bric a brac (and some fine bronze statues in one garden) and fruit stalls squashed into odd corners, and houses selling cakes and tea, or having an art exhibition (Betty opposite the Cinema is part of the local art group, and some of them are rather good) and Tom's Record Shop belting out music while a sign pointed the way to his juice bar 'Squeeze Me'. My next point of call was Di Blunt's house, so I could take her dog Molly out with Islay. Di was last seen in the Festival bookshop looking a bit fraught while a queue for a signing session stretched out of the door.