Tibetan Monks

I usually try to go to one good thing over the Festival, and this year my eye was caught by the Tibetan Monks from Tashi Lhunpo Monastery.
I went up on the shuttle bus after work. The performance had been delayed by half an hour, but I found friends who were going to see it too, and we sat together. They had Friends tickets (so got in first), and saved seats for the rest of us in a good central position.
The performance was sold out. An English lady in Tibetan dress introduced the different chants and dances, and eight monks performed them and played various musical instruments - drums, cymbals, bells, those huge long trumpets, 'snake-charmer' trumpets - and trumpets that were traditionally made out of the leg bones of humans, to attract demons, so that the monks could persuade them to be more compassionate (I think). They didn't say whether these particular trumpets were made from human bones.
I now know what the round black hat with the sticky up pom pom is, in Nepal Bazaar - the monks were wearing something very similar when they performed the Black Hat Dance. I liked the story that went with it, of the assassin hiding a small bow and arrow up the big sleeves of his costume so he could shoot the king - and he covered his white horse with charcoal beforehand so that when he escaped, he could swim the horse across a river and turn it from black to white so he wouldn't be recognised.
Tashi Lhunpo monastery was originally the monastery of the Panchen Lama, second only to the Dalai Lama - but the boy who was recognised as the new re-incarnation of the Panchen Lama was arrested by the Chinese, and no-one knows where he is. The monastery itself is no longer in Tibet, where they had 6,000 monks and students in its heyday, but near Mysore in Southern India, where there are now 300 monks.
One of the things they were selling in the interval was a monastery cookbook, with quantities for 300! (but they had scaled some of them down).
At the end of the performance, it's traditional at Hay Festival to give a long stemmed white rose to each of the speakers or performers - and the monks seemed delighted!

I think I made a good choice - though one friend said she'd been given tickets to see Dylan Moran, and laughed until her sides hurt!

This morning, St Michael's Hospice shop had had their window smashed - and it struck me that the Craft Centre, where all the break ins took place, has CCTV all over the place - for all the use it was. No-one knew about the break ins until the morning, when the first people came in to work, so obviously no-one watches the CCTV at the time, or they could have called the police when the crimes were being committed, rather than hours later when the criminals were long gone.