Our wonderful Town Cryer, George, will be retiring shortly. In fact, his last ever "shout" will be at the Christmas Market on Saturday 13th December.
It's hard to believe that he's been doing the job for sixteen years!
He's going to be a hard act to follow!
I couldn't go to the Dial-a-Ride Carol Concert this year, because I was at a meeting of the Cusop History Group committee organising the archaeological work at Cusop Castle next year on the same afternoon. I'll report more nearer the time, but it's very exciting to be involved in real archaeology again.
So I missed something unexpected and well deserved. During the concert, Mary Fellowes was honoured with a certificate and bouquet for all her hard work keeping Dial-a-Ride on the road.
Mary was one of the founder members of Dial-a-Ride, and she raised money for minibuses, and did a lot of organising behind the scenes, and put in a huge amount of hard work to keep it going over the years.
It's nice to see her being appreciated like this, and I'm sorry I missed it.
At least a photographer from the Brecon and Radnor Express was there - Mary looks quite surprised in the photo!
I was going to just huddle at home after I'd been to see the Craftland talk at the church - but I had noticed that there were free music events in between the Festival talks up at the Castle. One of them was the Blackthorn Ritualistic Folk.
Anyway, early in the afternoon I decided to listen to a podcast. Next on my list was Druidcast - and Damh the Bard was interviewing his friend Phil, who is one of the Blackthorn Ritualistic Folk group. It was such an interesting interview that I had to go and see them in action after that.
They are influenced by Border Morris - the sort where they bang sticks together - but they put together their own dances. They wear black tatters, and each dancer has an individual hat or head dress, sometimes based on the dancer's totem animal (there was a girl with a brilliant fox mask).
I saw three dances (there was another session later that night that I didn't go out for).
They started as a choir, singing a Pagan song about the changing seasons. Then they performed a dance based on the Skirrid Inn, where a horse skull was found under the floor (no-one knows why it was put there). They have their own, blue, horse skull, which is not a Mari Llwyd, but an English variant - I can't remember the name.
The second dance was based on the Anemone, the Flower of Death, and the third was a solo Irish jig in honour of the Black Hairstreak moth, which only lives in hedgerows where blackthorn grows.
There wasn't a lot of room in the Castle Great Hall - the group has about fifty members, so they were only able to do a cut down version of their usual performances, but it was great fun, and a good taste of the sort of thing that they do.
At the end of the performance Nino, a stray Shantyman, passed by. The friend I was standing with said that the Hay Shantymen's performance had been packed out, earlier in the afternoon.
Yesterday evening I was at St Mary's Church to see James Fox talk to Kate Humble.
He's an art historian, but for his latest book he has turned his attention to lost and vanishing crafts around the UK. Some crafts are critically endangered, meaning that only one person is carrying the craft on - and without apprentices to learn the craft, it will die out. Five crafts went extinct while he was writing the book. There is only one man in the UK, at the only bell foundry left in the UK (in Loughborough), who has the specialist skills to accurately tune a bell when it has been newly made, for example.
But it's not all doom and gloom - other crafts have been brought back from the brink of extinction and have a much brighter future.
We're very fortunate in Hay to have a wide variety of craftspeople - Christina Watson, who has painted shop signs around the town for many years (and more recently trained as an icon writer), was in the audience, and she said that the various craftspeople help each other out with work. Walking round the market earlier in the day, there were basket weavers, and potters and spinners and dyers, knitted and crocheted goods, wooden spoons and knives and bowls, and more. The sponsor of the event was Shepherds, the ice cream makers - that counts too, and so does cheese making and brewing.
In the past, people in Hay made straw hats, or cut wood for the soles of clogs, and there were tailors and dressmakers and cobblers, blacksmiths and carpenters. Some of those still survive, but one of the things James Fox talked about was how hard it is to learn those traditional skills now. My sister learned dressmaking at City and Guilds evening classes, for instance - those no longer exist. Technical colleges are much fewer in number, and no longer offer the same sort of courses in engineering as they once did. This is all part of government policy over many years, seeing these things as unimportant, and easy to cut funding for. I remember a friend seeing a government retraining scheme advertised a few years ago, so she applied in order to learn how to mend saddles - there's a need for that in this area. But they were only offering computer courses.
However, there are charities across the UK (James Fox works for one of them) that support craftspeople to train up new apprentices, and to provide workshops and tools for them.
And kids want to make things! James Fox was talking about his own kids, but I saw exactly the same thing when I was a Viking re-enactor going into schools to teach kids a simple form of weaving. There was a real hunger to do something with their hands, and there was no time in the curriculum for anything but academic work.
The other thing about crafts is that they last. Shops are full of plastic rubbish that has been brought half way around the world, and it's cheap - but it doesn't last. A craftsman-made mug can last a lifetime, but will be more expensive to buy. James Fox treated himself to a pair of Sheffield steel scissors - they cost £100, but they will last his lifetime, and far longer than 10 pairs of £10 scissors would last.
In Japan, skilled craftspeople are honoured as National Treasures, and encouraged to pass on their knowledge. In France, Notre Dame was rebuilt so quickly after the fire because there were trained young craftspeople available to do the work. We desperately need something similar in the UK.
I was going to do a lot more than I've been able to manage over this weekend, having been totally wiped out by a bad cold for a few days.
So I didn't get to the talk about the future of books at the Globe, and I only got to the Quantum Revolution because I'd spent £15 on the ticket and didn't want to waste it.
The foyer of the tent at the Castle this year was quite small - just the Festival Bookshop and gift shop, and a stall selling coffees.
Paul Davies, of the University of Arizona, and Vlatko Vedral from Oxford University, are both physicists, and both have books available.
It's 100 years since quantum theory began, with Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle, and we're at an exciting time for the future of quantum science. To set up what they were talking about, they explained the many worlds/variable state theory, in which atoms can be seen to be in several different places at the same time, or they can teleport. There are disagreements about whether this means full-on parallel universes (like Mirror, Mirror in Star Trek) or whether it is one universe in several different quantum states at the same time. They're also hoping that recent developments mean that they will be able to work on the problem of how quantum science and General Relativity fit together. At the moment, quantum works for very, very small things, and General Relativity works for big things, but nobody's quite sure how they fit together, or even if it's possible for them to fit together.
There's a race between the world powers to develop a working quantum computer - and fears of a quantum apocalypse, in which the quantum computers could break any current method of cryptography - so bank details, spying, and anything that had been encrypted could be made public.
Hopefully, before that happens, there's potential for a medical revolution, where molecules can be individually tailored to repair cells or block receptors so diseases can't spread. They even talked about the potential for a helmet like something out of a 1960s superhero comic - processes inside the brain cause magnetic fields which can be detected outside the brain, so a helmet that could pick up those fields could literally read your mind! They were thinking more along the lines of people being able to control robots, or prosthetic limbs, though.
There was a digression about geckos - their feet have hairs so fine they extend into the quantum realm, and that's how they can walk across ceilings!
In the questions at the end, they were asked what science fiction they read, and Paul Davies mentioned The Black Cloud by Fred Hoyle - partly because Fred Hoyle gave him his first job! (Watching him on stage, I got the feeling that he would have enjoyed the company of Brian Aldiss). Vlatko Vedral said it was very difficult to go to the movies as a physicist - what was portrayed in Interstellar, for example, doesn't work like that!
Another question was on ethics - is there an ethics department working alongside the physicists to maybe say "Well, you could do this - but should you?"
They obviously do take ethical considerations into account - but knowledge of quantum science is worldwide, and maybe everyone wouldn't be quite so careful.
By the time I got out of the marquee, the Christmas Lights had been turned on, but the square was still full of people - and traction engines, and a fire engine.
