Small Business Saturday

Hay Baby, good quality clothes for babies and small children, and a few toys.
This used to be a photographer's shop, until everyone started to use digital and mobile phones, and the owner also let out a place in South India that he owns for holidays.

Green issues and music

I managed to get up to the Festival site for two events yesterday. I also found Shelley and Richard's stall there - selling Richard's art and Shelley's scarves, so I made sure I was wearing the scarf she had given me for my birthday! It was lovely, too, to see the workshop where children were making their own stools, with proper woodworking handtools. BBC Radio Wales had a van there, too, with live music outside it, on air. When I passed it was a group of young black women singers, who were very good.
The first event I had tickets to was the Joseph Rotblat Lecture, given this year by Jonathon Porritt. Joseph Rotblat, it turns out, was a nuclear physicist who was involved in the Manhattan Project - and was the only scientist to resign from the project when it became clear that Germany was not developing a nuclear bomb. After the war, he was involved with Pugwash, a group concerned with trying to prevent nuclear proliferation and working for conflict resolution - they're still working today, behind the scenes in war zones like Syria, and between North and South Korea.
Where Joseph Rotblat felt that the most important threat to the planet in his time was nuclear war, today Jonathon Porritt feels the same way about climate change. But he hadn't come to talk about doom and gloom and how screwed the planet is - he's just written a book about how we can have a sustainable future. Looking back from 2050, he looks at all the different technologies that exist now, and can solve the problems that the planet faces. He said that he'd been campaigning for years, but only when he needed to do the research for the book did he sit down to take a good look at the science and technology that exists, and put all the pieces together.
The only weak link in the whole thing is the political will - politicians carrying on with their heads in the sand, as if they don't need to do anything. He said that even the most Republican of states in the US now accept that changes need to be made to deal with what they call "weird weather" (because they don't like to admit that it's climate change). Car companies are now investing heavily in electric and hybrid cars; the cost of solar panels is going down every year, while their efficiency is rising.
During the questions at the end, he was asked about fracking - and said that it was the last spasm of the oil industry, desperately clinging on to the current business model. It can never be a long term solution. He had spoken admiringly of Germany, with all the renewable power being generated there, but agreed with a member of the audience that it had been crazy to shut down the nuclear power plants before the natural end of their lives and make up the difference in power needs by burning brown coal.
Rosie Swales was on stage to interview Jonathon Porritt after his talk, and she said that Hay Festival is almost carbon neutral - the one area they can't be is in transport to the Festival site, especially when people fly in, and there is no real alternative to that at the moment.
I went down to the Festival shop after the talk - but I ended up walking out with one of George Monbiot's books rather than Jonathon Porritt's. I've been meaning to get a copy of Feral, about the "re-wilding" of Britain, for some time, and I couldn't really justify paying £24.99 for a book, no matter how good the talk had been!

In the evening, I went down to the Festival site again to see the Horsemen of the Apocalypse. The small Oxfam Moot tent wasn't full, which was a pity, because the music was excellent. I'd been drawn in by the promise of a lute - as it turned out, though, Ben Salfield had brought a strange hybrid of lute and guitar with him, called a lutar. He was joined by Jon Salfield on guitar (he started off as a flamenco guitarist) and Simon Stanton, who was sitting on one of his instruments - basically a tea chest, as first used for musical purposes by sailors in Cadiz. He also had a rain stick and triangle, and various drums, and a black pottery gourd thing from Africa.
They seem to have spent a lot of time touring around the world. Ben talked about writing one piece of music on the balcony of an Italian classical guitarist's flat, with the smell of fresh bread wafting up from the bakery below, while another was written on a tour of Poland, and the title is the motto of Solidarity. They also talked about visiting South America, and a city with the highest murder rate in the world!
It really was a lovely evening, and the applause at the end "was worth the long drive up from Cornwall"!

Warhorse and Wolves

Yesterday Michael Morpurgo was speaking at the Festival, about Warhorse - and the Warhorse puppet from the stage show was there as well! I met someone who had seen the talk, and they said that there had been other puppets there, too, including one covered in feathers but shaped like a horse!
Then I went up to the Castle to see the wolves - Sally Matthews has made two sculptures to stand around the ruined part of the Castle.

This was the best picture I could get with my weedy little camera. The other wolf overlooks the Honesty Gardens, and is standing on a windowsill.

I met Tim the Gardener walking through town, as well. He's still very enthusiastic about Homer, and is now writing a book about his thoughts about the Iliad. His theory is that it wasn't Helen's beauty that started the whole Trojan war - it was Thetis, the mother of Achilles, and the prophesy that her son would be greater than his father. He's also been doing a lot of research about Hermes, who he reckons was the working man's god, and the god of people who had been dispossessed by the new Greek aristocracy, because of various festivals in his honour where masters had to serve the servants, like the Roman Saturnalia - and there was one festival where devotees of the god were encouraged to go out and commit highway robbery in his honour! Hermes was the god of thieves, among other things.

Today, Platform One Crafts are in the Buttermarket (from Erwood Station) and there are vintage and craft stalls in the Cheesemarket as well.

And I think Marcus Brigstocke may have walked by when I was chatting in Backfold - or it could just have been a bloke with a beard!

Jim Saunders and the Bookshops of Hay

The other day I stopped by Broad Street Books because I noticed a new book about Hay in the window. It's called Hay: Landscape, Literature and the Town of Books, by Jim Saunders. The photographs are lovely, and we were wondering who Jim Saunders was, because neither I nor Dale knew him.
This evening, I met Paul Harris stomping up High Town with steam coming out of his ears. "Have you heard of Jim Saunders?" he asked. It seems that he was giving a talk at Hay Festival on Saturday, about his new book. It seems that he has lived in the area for 25 years, and runs a business called printsofwales.biz. And it seems that a snippet of his talk has been on the news today, in which he said that, if all the bookshops in Hay disappeared, Hay would be fine.
Er - what?!!!
Does he seriously think that removing twenty businesses from a small town - businesses for which the town is known around the world - would do no harm to the local economy at all? He's certainly infuriated at least one local bookseller.

Meanwhile, I met another friend in the morning, and we chatted about what we'd been to see at the Festival. She was going to go to the talk about Everest - because she had been the babysitter to the family when the speaker was a little boy! "How did he go from that to climbing Everest?" she asked. She was going to go along to embarrass him - but decided not to be so unkind in the end.

And welcome back Toby Parker, who used to sing at Kilvert's Open Mic and then the Globe, who has been busking around town today.
There was a little bit of sunshine this afternoon, but someone told me yesterday that it's supposed to be the wettest year since 1770 this year!

Traffic Chaos around Hay

I don't know why it is, but this year the traffic problems have seemed to be a lot worse than previous years. We've had wet years before where the car parks in fields were closed and shuttle buses brought people in from Clyro and Gwernyfed, but this year there seem to be a lot more traffic snarl ups.
Some people are blaming the Globe, which takes advantage of all the extra parking organised by the Hay Festival without doing anything to provide extra parking themselves.

Meanwhile in Hay, troops of Morris dancers appeared in the town square yesterday evening to dance. I don't think it was an event that was advertised - they just turned up and did it.

And this morning I listened to Midweek on Radio 4 broadcast from the BBC tent on the Festival site. Sir Roy Strong was one of the guests, together with a lady who sang a beautiful a capella setting of an AE Houseman poem (she runs a community choir and organises folk singing events) and a local racehorse trainer.

Festival - Steven Moffat's Talk, and Exhibitions around town

There was a little girl in the bookshop wearing a light blue sun dress, decorated with daleks and tardises. She was also wearing a Tardis necklace.
"I bet I know where you'll be this afternoon," I said, and I showed her the Tardis badge I was wearing under my waistcoat. "I'll be there, too."
The Cinema Bookshop opens until 9pm every night this week, and last night it was my turn to be there late. This means that we get two hours off during the day, and I used my time to get to Steven Moffat's talk at the Festival. If I missed that, I really couldn't call myself a Whovian any more! He was in the Tata Tent, one of the biggest on the Festival site, and it was very nearly full.
Alan Yentob was interviewing him, and went through his career in television, including marrying into a TV dynasty, headed by Beryl Vertue, who had been involved in Dr Who in its early days, and had also invented the idea of selling the format of a show to the US. So Steptoe and Son here was re-made as Stamford and Son there, and the US version of Till Death Do Us Part was a huge hit, too. They also talked about Coupling, as well as Sherlock and Doctor Who.
Steven Moffat said that there are certain things that make a story part of the Doctor Who universe. One is the mixture of the domestic and the epic - the amazing space and time machine in a Police Phone Box; the family details in the middle of an alien invasion, or the little boy in a gas mask asking "Are you my mummy?". The other is the Doctor himself "who should look like a senior consultant, and act like a student." Steven Moffat reminded everyone that, when they were first cast, no-one thought that either David Tennant or Benedict Cumberbatch were remotely sexy! But when they'd seen Casanova, where David Tennant played the young Casanova (and Peter O'Toole played Casanova at the end of his life) they thought that some of what he did was very Doctorish. "He was basically making a long audition video!"
Steven Moffat said it was very easy to spot brilliance in the actors who came up for the parts of the Doctor and the Companions - so making the casting decisions, he claimed, was just a matter of looking at the group of actors that the casting director has gathered together and going "That's brilliant" when the actor and the script click together.
Most of the questions at the end were about Doctor Who, of course ("What can you tell us about Season 8?" "I could tell you lots of things...."). One little boy admitted to calling Cybermen Cidermen "when he was little", and Steven Moffat instantly said; "I used to do that as well!" and added that the Weeping Angels ("scary ladies with big faces") weren't very scary on the set.
As the talks were running a little late to accommodate people using the wet weather parking, which is further away from the Festival site, I had to creep out just before the end to get back to work, but I did manage to hear one more question: "Why is Doctor Who filmed in Cardiff?"
Steven Moffat said: "Because it is the place on the planet that looks most like the future, in space! Or at least - it does now." And then admitted that it had been the BBC's decision to film it in their Cardiff studios.
I didn't learn very much that was new to me, but it was a very entertaining talk, and well worth skipping out of work for!

This morning, I bumped into Athene English on my way to work, and she pointed out the place where a poor man had slipped and impaled himself on railings the night before - the air ambulance had been called out, and there were police cars, and some of the railings had to be cut away. There was red and white tape around the gap where they had been. She'd seen it all from her bedroom window. We have a charity box at work for the Air Ambulance, and they do really good work in this area. So, I hope the man wasn't too badly hurt. At least he was in good hands.

And on a happier note, the Hay yarn bomber has been putting up crocheted 'works of heart' around town.

There was a craft fair in the Buttermarket today, and I went in to admire Pedran Harps, who had come over from Pembrokeshire. I wish I were musical! They have a website at www.pedranharps.co.uk
There's also an exhibition on at Salem Chapel, of art made out of driftwood, called Artefacts, and another at Cae Mawr Studio, down the Offa's Dyke Path near the big car park, where Gaynor and Georgina Funnell are showing their pictures, along with Sarah Putt and Tracy Thursfield, Francesca Kay and Cassie Rendle. They all do really good and interesting work, in various media from painting and sculpture to knitting.
And at the Hourglass Gallery on Broad Street there's an exhibition called "Hay: People and Places as seen by Local Artists". Gaynor and Georgina Funnell, and Sarah Putt, also have work there, alongside Simon Burrage, Mark Clements, Henrietta Price-Daly, Kate Pritchard and David Pitt. That exhibition will be going on until the 7th July.

More From the Festival

I spent a lovely, relaxed evening at Tomatito's last night, out in the patio garden at the back. The bench was damp but the rain held off and the music was wonderful. Alan Cooper the fiddler was playing, with his friends Simon Newcombe on guitar and Di Esplin on cello. They have a new CD out together, called Alive, which they were selling, along with an earlier CD, Street (which I already have - I bought it from them when they were busking in town one day). They played music from Ireland and Scandanavia, and even Venezuela, all completely acoustic - there were no mics.
There were quite a few locals in the audience who appreciate good music. One of them was Chris the bookbinder, who had brought a few copies of the new poetry magazine/book Quirk along. It's the fourth issue, (though number 3 as they started with zero) and I was speaking to Cotters a few days ago about it. One of his poems is in it, with an illustration specially done by Martina Jirankova-Limbrick, which he was very pleased about. There are quite a few other familiar names there, like Sarah Putt from Booths, Tracy Thursfield from Addyman's, Chris himself, Tim the Gardener, and many more poets and artists. I was sufficiently impressed when leafing through it to part with a fiver.
I slipped away as it was getting dark, so I missed music from Jasmine, who had just arrived.

I started this morning by listening to Broadcasting House on Radio 4 as usual, but today it was coming from the BBC tent at the Festival with an audience of around 200 people, and two members of the public were up on stage doing the newspaper review along with David Aaronovitch and Lauren Child the children's author.
I also saw a silver BBC van leaving town, which had been up at the Castle for a new antiques programme that they were filming yesterday.
The rain wasn't quite so bad today, but it was fairly heavy in the afternoon.