Hay Festival 2024 – Part Two

Obviously, because we were here on a Saturday, I looked for the nearest Parkrun.

‘There’s one in Hay-on-Wye’ itself! You two can have a pootle around the town while I go run.’

Angela, our friend and instigator of this trip, did not look as excited as me, about leaving the house at 8.20am on her holiday; the first booked talk wasn’t until 11.30 that morning. Anne also gave me a Paddington-like hard stare and asked me how much I wanted to get to Parkrun. 

‘Well, it’s not necessary I suppose.’

My whiny voice did the trick and they got themselves up early to explore the town, or at least find a nice coffee shop. They were glad in the end because the weather was lovely, and because they managed to spot a kite circling in the air on the way (I missed it because I was driving). It was a good job really because if I’d looked at the website more closely, I would have seen in bright red letters at the top of the home page that Parkrun had been cancelled due to the festival.

We did find a nice coffee shop, ‘The Cosy Café’, where I sheepishly changed back into civvies. It was a stone’s throw from the castle that we had also got tickets for on the Sunday.

We could see just how many bookshops there were in just that little central triangle of town, which didn’t bode well for our bank balances, but that exploration was saved for the following day, and we headed back to the festival site.

First up was Anne Enright, who I’d at least heard of but Anne, my Anne that is, had read her latest book The Wren, The Wren, which had been shortlisted for the Women’s Prize. The second Irish person in two days; it seems that the Emerald Isle is still churning out literary artists like no other place. In fact, Enright’s book makes a small exploration of this in her novel as the main protagonist’s father is a celebrated poet. At some point I’ll read the book, but my TBR pile is still quite high. 

Mark Cocker and Hamza Yassin were next, being interviewed by Kate Humble. The only person I knew was Hamza (from Strictly Come Dancing), because I don’t really watch that many nature programmes. However, it turned out to be an enthusiastically joyous and fascinating talk about birds, and when Anne asked Hamza about his time on Strictly while he was signing his book, Be A Birder, he said he’d had the best time, and it gave him a bigger platform to showcase his conservation work. His love of nature began at an early age when his folks put on programmes like David Attenborough’s ‘Life On Earth’, to help the kids improve their English. He also realised that he knew some of the birds in this country because he’d seen them back in Sudan where he was born and spent his first years, which ignited his fascination with bird migration and gave him a little kinship with them.

The final speaker of the first half of our chosen talks was Jean Menzies. I did feel a little out of place as there were quite a lot of kids in the audience, and I felt a mite guilty for having bagged really good seats, and for once in my life, blocking the view of a smaller person.

There are no seat reservations at Hay. Once the doors open people just stream in and find a spot. It depends a bit on where you are in the queue, and whether you’re a Hay member, as they get first dibs on the chairs before the rest of us. There are quite a lot of people swanning around the festival with lanyards around their necks and I suspect this  was a sign of membership. Fair play to them, as they pay a small chunk for this early access privilege, although don’t tell them that we managed to sneak in a couple of times into their queue because of some kindly ticket checkers.

Jean Menzies is a Doctor of History who has written several history books for children, hence the demographic of the clientele. She looked barely out of her teens herself, she’s 28 apparently, and her bouncy, laughing demeanour engaged really well with the kids, throwing out questions to keep them on their toes, and we ended up buying her book, Goddesses and Heroines, for our granddaughter Rian, who’s 10 – after we’ve read it first of course.

We had a few hours after Jean, thank goodness, because I was getting hungry. Alongside the Canteen, there is a formal restaurant and a café for cake. There are activity tents for young people, and lots of deck chairs and hammocks strewn on the squares of grass between the walkways. I did have my eye on the hammocks, but I didn’t get a look in as the weather was so warm, but we all did partake of the locally famous Shepherds Ice Cream, made from sheep’s milk, on more than one occasion.

Alice Roberts, another academic, slightly older this time, was hands down the best speaker of the weekend. She had us all captivated, and as she was talking about illness and disease in mediaeval Britain, that was quite a feat. She was able to tell you a story, take you on a journey, and develop your knowledge and understanding without patronising you. Plus, she had a very calm stage presence, amplified by coming after Jean Menzies’ occasionally nervous offering. Of course, we bought her book, Crypt, too. 

Late in the evening (for me anyway) was Ruby Wax. She began at 8.30 and was apparently doing a two-hour set. Not, as she stipulated at the very beginning, a stand-up gig. But performing in a one-woman play called I’m Not As Well As I Thought I Was. I suppose we should have been warned by the title.

So, here’s the thing. I’m not terribly good at finding the same things funny as most other people. I may chuckle gently and with empathy at sets by Victoria Wood or Eddie Izzard, but I don’t like humour that is making fun out of people at their expense, even if they’re the one telling the joke. It wasn’t a stand-up routine, it was a one-woman play, but the play was about a descent into depression and was narrated by Ruby Wax, playing Ruby Wax, with the same, slightly manic persona that she uses for her other routines and many of the lines are still played for laughs. It was difficult to differentiate between the real and embellished, and the narrative, at times for me, was sometimes disjointed. Overall, I found it interesting, because I don’t have any experience of clinical depression. Angela found it somewhat disturbing because, although the narrative arc sees Ruby seemingly making a recovery, the recency of the period (during lockdown and after) sometimes gave one a sense that Ruby was reliving it. Angela said it felt too raw and there was no clear demarcation between Ruby, the current performer, and Ruby, the sufferer of this episode of depression. 

Ruby had a break after the performance and then there was a Q&A, but we didn’t stay for that. In hindsight, that might have been interesting, especially if some of our thoughts were explored. But we were all tired by the day and the intensity of that final piece that we knocked it on the head early.