On Monday evening we managed to book a place to stay in Hay-on-Wye for a whole week next year.
It was hours after we’d returned from the little town on the southeast borders of Wales, and it is a testament to the festival’s popularity that our booking was the last affordable (just about) place available for 2025.
Of course, there is the option of camping, as is more traditional, but I am not a happy camper and much prefer a proper bed and solid walls around me. What surprises me is that I’m ready to go back there immediately. I never normally return so soon with places I visit.
But then the Hay Festival has always been somewhere I’ve wanted to go to. The ‘town of books’ has had a gravitational effect for book-lovers even before the festival began in 1988, but the further draw of meeting some of the authors – the first one included Seamus Heaney and Salman Rushdie – amplified its power exponentially. It’s a wonder that I’ve only made it for the first time now.
Our drive down on Friday was a long but scenic journey to Brecon, another town in Powys where our abode for this year was. It is lovely but a good fifteen miles from Hay, and deeper into Wales. However, virtually next door was a cathedral church that was originally built at the turn of the first millennium in the time of the Normans. I mention this, not for its architectural or spiritual interest, but because Matt Smith and Karen Gillan signed the guestbook in 2010 when the cathedral was used in an episode of Doctor Who.
But back to Hay. On the Friday night we had two things booked. A bloke who I’d never heard of called Diarmuid Hester, and then Tim Spector and Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall.
Our first experience of the site was how well the excellent volunteers directed the many hundreds of cars filing in at all hours of the day. We had booked parking but hadn’t done it early enough to go in the official disabled spots but with a flash of Anne’s badge they got us as close to the front as they could, which was very close.
This is my kind of festival. From the entrance, the walkways were all raised and carpeted, so apart from perhaps navigating the parking field on a wet day, no wellies would be needed. In fact, the majority of the site was covered above us too, which was appreciated on the Sunday evening when the heavens opened wide. The queues are polite, well organised and for the most part, not for very long, unless you were one of the hundreds getting your book signed by the author of Diary Of A Wimpy Kid.
Diarmuid was a sweet young academic with an Irish accent and a slight look of Paul Mescal in All Of Us Strangers. He hadn’t seen the film yet when I got our book signed so I hope he takes it as a compliment when he does. His was a solo show where he took us on a bit of a narrative journey of how his book, Nothing Ever Just Disappears, began to take form. It looks at place, and takes the lives of seven historical queer people, from E.M. Forster to Derek Jarman, via Josephine Baker and James Baldwin amongst others, and sees how they affected their landscapes. I’ve not read it yet, but he spoke very eloquently with humour and warmth, so I was persuaded to buy the book.
We did remind each other on the journey down, as we followed the winding tarmac through the verdant farmlands of Herefordshire and Powys, that we weren’t obliged to buy every book of every speaker we went to see. And I didn’t buy Tim’s or Hugh’s. Not because we weren’t impressed. They were very genial, and Tim came across as less smug than I sometimes find him on his podcasts. But most of what they said in the talk I’d heard from the ZOE podcasts, so I knew I wouldn’t be learning anything new. They were on the Global Stage, the largest of the five main auditorium marquees. We sat in this one a few times over the weekend, in different places. Sometimes at the back, and sometimes closer to the front. On either side of the stage, there are two side screens that give close ups to people at the back, and the sound is excellent throughout, so I never felt short changed.
In between the two talks, there was the Canteen, a mega marquee with a plethora of food and drinks stalls around its edges and communal tables and benches in the middle. Again, there was a host of volunteers on hand to clear and wipe down tables ready for the next group, and a decent attempt to get people to bring their own or reuse cups. I may bring my metal picnic plate next time and see if I can leave no waste at all.
It was a short but exciting introduction to the weekend, and as we drove back, we were all a little giddy with the buzz of it all. We hadn’t even investigated the town yet, and this place was already meeting our expectations and then some.
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