Backfold Beauty

Just before the Festival, the Thoughtful Gardener and friends did some planting on the scrap of ground at the top of Backfold.
At one point, it was very overgrown, and then the bushes were drastically cut back.
This is what it looks like now:

It'll be lovely when those new plants have grown up a bit.

And More Pop-Ups

Not the best photo, but this is the shop next door to The Story of Books, where there was a fire. Renovations are still going on, but they've still opened for Anna's Pop-Up Shop, which is selling CDs and clothes and other bits and pieces.

Here's the shop that used to be Beer Revolution, opened up for leather goods and art. These people have come to the Festival before, when they were in the shop which is now Green Ink Books.

And a gallery by the Clock Tower, at Hazy Daze.

On Monday, the town was full of buskers - some really good guitarists and fiddle players - and this chap:

Extinction Rebellion Events

This was the Extinction Rebellion march on Saturday. They met up at the Co-op, and marched through town to the Festival site, and then back again. Gandalf was there, and the pink canoe, and people in fancy dress including a lawyer (with a placard saying 'Climate Justice').
The night before the march, someone climbed up the scaffolding around Hay Castle to hang these banners:

Here they are, with the Fair on the Square in full swing below. There was some really good live music over the weekend, with stalls and food and the Wildlife Trust doing crafts in the Cheese Market.

On Wednesday afternoon at 5.30pm, there will be a talk at the Festival, at the Wales stage, called "Extinction Rebellion - is it Time?"
For the talk, Extinction Rebellion will be staging an event outside the tent, where award-winning artist Gavin Turk and international environmental lawyer Farhana Yamin will be talking to environmental entrepreneur Ed Gillespie.

Meanwhile Ellie Chowns, the Green councillor who spoke at the Hereford Extinction Rebellion event, is now Green MEP for the West Midlands!

More Pop-Ups

Here's the new art gallery at what used to be Boz Books - they've taken out a dividing wall, and exposed the original stonework and beams, and it looks fantastic in there! They're calling themselves Ty Tan Gallery (the Tan should have a little hat on the a), meaning Fire House, as it was the original fire station, and there is still a fireman's helmet hanging up outside.

Then there's a bar in the alley way beside the old HSBC Bank.

The old Open Door chapel is now a sculpture gallery for Carol Peace.

BBC - Free but Ticketed

I spent quite a lot of time at the Festival site on Friday, looking round the stalls, browsing the Oxfam bookshop, and sitting in the BBC Tent. I also came across a few people from HOWLS, with collecting buckets to support the Library.

Here's a signboard with a quote from Greta Thunberg. By the late afternoon it was covered with comments from Festival goers, supporting her.

Audiences for BBC programmes have to book a free ticket to get in, and my choices were Free Thinking for Radio 3 and Front Row Late.
It was fascinating to see the differences between the radio show and the TV show. There was a "warm up man", dressed in striped tshirt and beret, who made the point that silent appreciation didn't really work on radio - so if we wanted to react to something, it would be good if it were audible. For the TV show, he said that silent smiling and nodding was also fine, because there was a camera trained on the audience.
The radio show also had big microphones in front of each speaker, with the presenter wearing headphones, while the TV show had leather chairs and invisible mics which had to be adjusted by the sound man before they started, while Mary Beard chatted to the audience.
Free Thinking is chaired by Rana Mitter, a presenter I'd not come across before, and he did a very good job of involving all the members of the panel in a discussion of Silent Spring, the environmental book by Rachel Carson which was published in 1962 (to predictable cries of "Who does this woman think she is?" by the vested interests she was criticising). Tony Juniper, now chair of Natural England, said it was the first book that was recognisable as a modern environmental work, and it blended science and personal testimonies with lyrical nature writing.
The other members of the panel were Dieter Helm, an economist, Emily Shuckburgh, a climate scientist, and Kapka Kassabova, another climate scientist who grew up on the Soviet side of the Iron Curtain. This programme will be broadcast on Wednesday 29th May at 10pm, and is available as a BBC Arts & Ideas podcast.

Front Row Live was being filmed to be shown later, at 11pm that evening, but as if it was live, and included film clips of interviews done previously on the various topics that were covered. Simon Schama was one of the panel, and one of the topics was a new exhibition at the Jewish Museum in London about Jewish stereotypes. It includes an early work by Rembrandt, and as Simon Schama is an expert on Rembrandt Mary Beard, the chair of the discussion, got him to wax lyrical about the painting.
They also talked about changes in comedy shows over the years, and about what was offensive. This included clips from Fleabag and Alf Garnett, and it was noted that the audience was laughing at the jokes in the modern comedy, but not at the Alf Garnett clip, where he was being racist while extremely drunk.

There was enough of a gap between the two events for me to walk back down the Brecon Road to one of the stalls set out in a front garden. This was Pip's Cider Bar. The bar itself was in a horsebox, with straw bales set out around the garden to sit on.

I treated myself to a cider cocktail, Festival Fancy, which was cider, apple juice and elderflower over ice.

Pop-up Shops

There seems to be a lot of leather around this year.
Up on Castle Street, in the old Gibbons' Butchers' shop, is Hayley Hanson, selling local Welsh leather goods:

Meanwhile, down on The Pavement, there's Matt Fothergill, from Ludlow:

For refreshment purposes, apart from the usual cafes, there's the Burger Shop at St John's, and this Gin Palace in half of the old Roses' Children's Bookshop:

And to nourish the mind, there's an exhibition called Riposte, split between the Drawing Room and the Poetry Bookshop:

The marquees are going up for Fair on the Square - and finally, an important customer announcement:

First Day of the Festival

We saw lots of coaches heading to the Festival site this morning, dropping off school parties for the schools programme.
Later, some of them parked in the main car park:

It was also polling day for the European elections, so I went along to vote at lunchtime. There was a steady flow of voters, most of them older people (I went at lunch time).

John Clare's Exhibition

I've just come back from the private viewing of John Clare's pictures, in the little gallery at the back of Tinto House.
He said he'd decided to hold the private view just before the Festival, so that people would be able to come - he's tried to do it during the Festival before, and everyone has been too busy to come!
This year, he's selected pictures of the area of Greece he visits, the Mani, and the small town where Patrick Leigh Fermor, the travel writer, used to live, Kardamili. There are gardens, and olive trees, and blue, blue water. I really like the pictures he's done in pastels.
And it's all set within Tinto House's wonderful garden, carefully tended by Tim the Gardener.

Pop-up Shops

Here they are in Castle Street, just in time for the Festival.
CR Books is returning to The King of Hay, and Rosa Azul is a Fairtrade shop.

Extinction Rebellion March and Picnic

Here I am, dressed as the Goddess Gaia, on my way home from the Extinction Rebellion march and picnic. In the basket I had a small globe, which I carried in the march as the planet I was protecting, and my historical re-enactment wooden bowl, goblet and spoon, which I brought out of retirement because the food and drink were being served with no disposable plates or cutlery.
I had a good chat with several people there, and talked about the days when I used to help out with school visits for children who were studying Vikings. Sometimes they would go up to the farm where my friends lived, where they could cook a real Viking lunch and do various outdoor activities and crafts. When the school opted to send the children with packed lunches instead, it was very noticeable how much rubbish was left when they'd finished, whereas we Vikings produced no waste at all.

There were speeches from Gandalf, who has been involved in various environmental protests in the last few years, and Ellie Chowns, the leader of the Green group of councillors in Herefordshire County Council. Herefordshire already had four Green councillors, including Ellie, up to the recent local elections, and now they have seven, with the already sitting councillors increasing their majorities. Ellie was sorry she couldn't spend the whole day at the rally, but she had a coach load of schoolchildren arriving at her organic farm that afternoon, so had to be there to show them around.

Unlike the last Extinction Rebellion march, where there were no police to be seen, yesterday there was a discreet police presence around town - and in the Old Market there were a couple of chaps in jackets with the Old Market logo on them who looked a bit dubious as we processed up to Waitrose and back.
Leading the procession was a pink canoe with Tell the Truth written on it, Hereford's version of the big pink yacht that was in the middle of Oxford circus in the recent London protests. About 50 people from Hereford went to those protests, and about 10 of them were arrested. There were also banners, and a life sized cardboard cutout of David Attenborough! There was also a very good saxophonist.
Along the march, I met a lady who lives in Capetown, South Africa! She's visiting the area (I think she came from Herefordshire originally), heard about the rally the day before, came along and grabbed a banner!

There they are, around the statue of the Hereford Bull.

The Remain campaign, Herefordshire for Europe, have a regular tent on the market, and as we passed they shouted out that they hoped we were all going to vote on Thursday.
Coming round the outside of the Old Market, on the way back to the pedestrian crossing, we also passed a small group of Brexit Party activists. The only comment I heard from them was "I used to be a hippy once."
Most people round town seemed happy to see the procession, and the people giving leaflets out ran out of supplies!
Back at Castle Green, the kitchen had been making lentil and vegetable soup, and the music tent was all ready for the musicians to play. Castle Green, for those who don't know it, is tucked away near the Cathedral - go past the Elgar statue to leave the Cathedral Close, and turn right down Quay Street to find it.
Sadly, I couldn't stay for long, as I had to get the bus back to Hay.

Wye Valley Meadery

I got a taste for mead when I was a re-enactor - Moniak was the drink of choice around the camp fires in the evenings.
So I was interested to see this in Hay Deli:

This is a sort of cross between craft beer and mead - they add Cascade hops as a cold infusion during the fermentation of the mead. It's more sparkly than mead without hops, and comes in at a strength of 5.5%, about the same as a stronger beer. It's also bottle conditioned, which means there may be a bit of residue in the bottom.

The information on the label starts with the hard work of the bees - 300,000 flowers visited, and 12,000 miles flown for the honey in one bottle!
Their website, www.wyevalleymeadery.co.uk, is fascinating - they run mead making courses, where you can learn about mead from around the world, and mead through the ages (Wales is a traditional mead drinking area right back into the Middle Ages, and long before that).
They also run bee keeping courses, something that's particularly important now. As Sir David Attenborough has said - in the last 5 years, the bee population of the world has dropped by one third.
If that continues, humans will be unlikely to survive, since bees are essential to pollinate all sorts of different crops.
So the more people willing and able to keep bees, the better.

As well as the honey and hops mead, they also produce Honey and Rhubarb and Honey and Elderflower - I'll be looking out for them!

Extinction Rebellion Rally/March/Picnic

I hope the weather's dry for Saturday, as I'll be heading into Hereford to spend the day at Castle Green for the Rally and Picnic organised by Extinction Rebellion, the campaigners against climate change.
They're going to be providing vegetarian food and non-alcoholic drinks - and are asking people to bring their own bowls, spoons and mugs. No throw-away paper plates or plastic cutlery for this picnic.
So I'm bringing out my old re-enactment wooden bowl and spoon, and wooden goblet, and I'll be dressing up in a floral gown and green cloak as the Goddess Gaia (any excuse to dress up!).
They start at Castle Green at 11am, and the idea is to celebrate life on this planet, as well as keeping the issue of climate change in the public eye - and they intend to leave Castle Green immaculately clean at the end of the day.
There will be music, too.

Hay Castle News

Lots of stuff going on at the Castle at the moment.

Richard Suggett, the Senior Investigator for the Royal Commission on the Ancient and Historical Monuments of Wales has been closely involved in the project to restore Hay Castle since 2011, will be giving a talk about the castle during Hay Festival. He'll be talking about the history of the Castle, new dating techniques, and some of the early tenants of the Hay lordship. These include Maestorglwyd in Llanigon, where the house has been dated to 1420 with a new isotopic dating technique.
The talk will be on Tuesday 28th May at 5.30pm and is Event 194 in the Festival programme.

The Castle has also been working with local company BWA to design all the signage and information that will be going up around the Castle when it re-opens to the public. It won't just be a few signboards - they're planning books, sounds, audio-visual and tactile elements. These will tie in with the historical research that's been going on, and the school projects, talks, events and consultations that the Castle have been running.
One account of life in the Castle is by Bramwell Bradley, who started as a houseboy in 1928, when Lady Glenusk was in residence. He stayed at the Castle until 1938, when Lady Glenusk died, and he was the last person to leave the house, locking the gate behind him.
The Victorian stable buildings to one side of the Castle are going to be used as start-up units for small businesses, thanks to a grant from the Brecon Beacons National Park Sustainable Development Fund. Several Hay businesses started off there, including 18 Rabbit, The Thoughtful Gardener, Bain & Murrin's Emporium and the sadly missed Beer Revolution, as well as a variety of small bookshops.

There are also plans to rebuild the gables that were destroyed in the 1939 fire - there were plans to rebuild soon after the fire, until the Second World War meant that people had different priorities. However, someone gathered together the surviving stones from the gables, and stored them - and they have now been found, under the rubble where the Jacobean staircase used to stand!

And while building work is going on, the workers are also being careful to protect any bats that might be living in the walls. They have a bat expert on site, who is identifying any places bats may be roosting, and filling in the spots where there are no bats to be found, so that the builders can go ahead. They have also built some new bat accommodation.

Monte Cassino and a Talk on the Home Guard

Saturday was the 75th Anniversary of the Battle of Monte Cassino, and the British Legion were at the war memorial at 12.30pm to commemorate it. This was organised by Kelvyn Jenkins, who also played the Last Post. Poems and diary entries were read, the piper played, and wreaths were laid.
Also present were these rather fine dogs:

Then George the Town Cryer announced a talk at the Parish Hall at 2pm, about the Home Guard and auxiliary services.
This was well attended, by a mostly older audience, and there was plenty of cake at the interval!
Peter Weston, a military historian, gave the talk which started, inevitably, with a picture of the most famous Home Guard platoon of all, Walmington-on-Sea's Dads Army.
As Peter Weston said, although the series was based on truth, there was far more to the Home Guard than that.
For a start, they began as the LDV (or Look, Duck, Vanish) - the Local Defence Volunteers, and all they had as a uniform were armbands. As time went on they became better equipped and better trained. There was one photo showing the Home Guard in 1940 compared to 1944. The 1940 man is just wearing his own clothes and an arm band, while the 1944 man has a full uniform and kit, and looks every inch the professional soldier. They even had the honour of guarding Buckingham Palace during the War, and were also trained to man Anti-Aircraft guns. The name change, from LDV to Home Guard, was Churchill's idea.
I hadn't known that there were cavalry units of the Home Guard, out patrolling moorland looking for parachutists, and other specialist units on the railways and at factories that were likely to be German targets.
There were also women in the Home Guard, at first in an unofficial capacity, doing the cooking or clerical work, but later official Home Guard members who even got rifle training.

After the interval, Peter Weston talked about the auxiliary units. In every country that was invaded by the Germans in the Second World War, resistance groups grew up to sabotage them, the most famous being the French Resistance. With the threat of invasion in 1940, the British decided to prepare for this in advance, and set up secret auxiliary groups drawn from the Home Guard. They were often gamekeepers and other people who knew the local country well, or doctors, who could travel around unsuspected. They had secret hideouts, and the idea was that they should go into hiding when the Germans invaded (the hideouts were equipped with two weeks' worth of stores) and then reappear behind enemy lines to do whatever sabotage they could. They also had a list of people to assassinate, starting with the local Chief Constable, who would have been one of the few people to know who they were!
They volunteered for this knowing that their life expectancy would only be about two weeks, and that if (or when) they were caught their families and villages would probably suffer reprisals from the Germans as well.
Fortunately they were never needed.

At the end of the talk, there was a presentation to a man in the audience who had been a member of the Home Guard! He had joined the Home Guard in the 1950s, though, when the idea was revived for a few years at the height of the Cold War. Mayor Trudy Stedman presented him with a badge to show his service, which he had not been given at the time.

There were also displays of Home Guard uniform, photos of local Home Guards, a rifle and even a baby's gas mask - the sort that you put the baby completely inside.

Yarn Bombing

A lady contacted me and asked what yarn bombing was.
Well, here's an example from a few years ago:

I seem to remember being part of a group of ladies who went sneaking round town under cover of darkness tying crocheted and knitted items to lamp posts. It was a very giggly occasion!

Diaries at the Library

I went down to the Library yesterday afternoon, as Huw Parsons was giving a talk about his diary of life in Clyro, and other local diarists.
There were nine of us in the end, including a local Kilvert enthusiast, a couple who moved to Hay from Liverpool a month ago, and two ladies in wheelchairs from "the care home" (I'm assuming they meant Cartref).
Huw started off with a poem he wrote about Bob Dylan, who was one of the last people to use the Severn Ferry just before the Severn Bridge opened - there's a photo of him standing on the quayside. Huw has made a podcast of it, at https://huwspodcast.wordpress.com
Then he talked about this area's most famous diarist, Francis Kilvert, who was curate in Clyro in the 1860s. John the Kilvert enthusiast has just had an article published in the Kilvert Society magazine, suggesting that local vicar and member of the Woolhope Club, Rev. W.E.T. Morgan, may have been the best man at Kilvert's wedding - though of course, he can't ask him about it now!
The other local diarist was Anne Hughes, who wrote her Boke in 1796 - 97. The book was found at the beginning of the 20th century by Jeanne Preston, who extensively rewrote the original - her version was serialised in the Farmers' Weekly in 1937 and, sadly, the original book disappeared some time during the Second World War, so there is no way of comparing the two.
People have been looking for the village that Anne wrote about for years, because many details in the book have been changed, but Huw's theory is that it describes Much Marcle in Herefordshire. The book is called The Diary of a Farmer's Wife, and it's very entertaining.
Then he read extracts from his own diary. With the help of YouTube videos, he has bound the books himself, and copies are now available in the library.
It was an entertaining talk, and afterwards I walked up the hill with a friend who was also in the audience and a mutual friend of Huw's (she remembers him taking her small children for a ride on his motorbike - off road!).
Although we had been given a cup of tea by the librarian, which was very nice - we weren't expecting refreshments - we decided to carry on chatting at Café Hay in the Craft Centre. Although it's been there for years, I don't think I've ever been inside before. So we enjoyed coffee and cake and a window seat until her parking ticket ran out.

Crafts At the Petition Office

The recall petition to remove Chris Davies as our local MP opened yesterday at 9am (one lady was there at one minute past nine!). It's in the Council Chambers, and the last time I was in that room, I was a witness at a wedding. There's disabled access round the back, and they have a magnifying glass for people who need large print.
There are two ladies in charge of the procedure, crossing your name off the electoral register and giving you the form to sign. One of them was knitting a jumper. They're there for six weeks, so she'll probably have finished it by then! So we got chatting about Stitch and Bitch (she already goes to another craft group at Three Cocks), and trying out different crafts.
There's a hotel down in Okehampton that runs craft courses - you stay for a few days (at very reasonable rates) and sign up for as many different craft courses as you wish - she enjoyed the glass engraving, and there were various pottery courses, and all sorts of other crafts, as well as entertainment in the evenings - and Okehampton is in a lovely part of the country. A whole group from Three Cocks went a couple of years ago.
They remembered the fad for yarn bombing, and I admitted to being one of the yarn bombers of Hay - and now there's a new fad of leaving painted pebbles around for children to find. That started last year, and I've just carried on doing it. It's a good way of experimenting to see how different techniques work.

Hay Music - Onwards and Upwards!

Hay Music are shortly going to be putting on their One Hundredth concert!
The idea of having affordable, good quality chamber music in Hay was started by John Stark, and supported by Elizabeth Haycox at Booth Books, where many of the concerts have been held. I don't go to many of them, but I do remember them managing to get a gorgeous harpsichord upstairs in Booths Bookshop for one concert.
They've also had concerts outside Hay - there have been several in Dorstone House, where there will be a party soon to thank John for all his hard work.

Hay Music is now a charitable trust, and they're keen to engage larger ensembles in the future, such as the Choir of Clare College Cambridge, who are already booked for December this year.
The ticket prices rarely cover the overheads, but they are helped by Friends and Patrons. They are now looking for an Independent Examiner to look at their accounts before they submit their accounts to the Charities Commission.

Hay Music has also been keen to provide outreach to local school children, with events during the Hay Chamber Music Festivals. Some of the visiting musicians have been into Hay School to work with the children.
Sadly, the Head of Hay School has recently announced that there is no funding available for staff to provide musical activities of any kind (even though they have a cupboard full of instruments!), and any musical education is dependent on visiting musicians from Hay Music and local volunteers.

This year's Chamber Music Festival will be in September, and the Fitzwilliam String Quartet will be back to play.
Hay Music is also on the programme of this year's Hay Festival, with a concert in St. Mary's Church, at 7pm on May 27th, with a world premiere of Howard Skempton's Preludes and Fugues, as well as a full programme of Schubert, Mendelssohn, Schumann, Chopin, Weir, Muhly and Novak.

The Hay Music website is at www.haymusic.org

European Elections

It looks as if the European Elections on 23rd May are going ahead - I got my polling card today.
Our area is Mid and West Wales. The first MEP for the area was Ann Clwyd, followed by David Morgan, and was Eluned Morgan until 2004, at which point the seat changed hands from the Labour party to UKIP's John Bufton, followed by UKIP's Nathan Gill, who later became an independent, and has recently joined the Brexit Party.

It's also the first day of the Hay Festival!

Commemorating the Second World War

Huw's Diary

Huw Parsons lives in Clyro and, like Francis Kilvert before him, he's been keeping a diary.
It now runs to five volumes, and he's bound them into books himself - and has now donated them to Hay Library for anyone to read.
On Friday 10th May, at 2pm, he'll be giving a short talk about his diaries at the Library, and also about the diaries of Rev. Kilvert and Ann Hughes.

Faceache

This is how I feel today. I had a big back tooth out on Monday, and I'm still rather tender. The dentist was very patient with me, though I'm sure he thinks I'm a big wimp.
So I'm taking things easy at the moment....