Hay Festival 2025

Anne asks me a random question.

‘Can you describe the talks we’ve seen with words beginning with “C”?’
‘Why the letter “C”?’
‘Because the first words I thought of all began with it, so I wondered if I could create a theme.’

It’s hard to bring a coalescence to such diverse speakers as Emma Barnett talking about Motherhood and Tom Holland describing his new translation of Suetonius, so I have to think about it for a while.

Having been to the Hay Festival for the very first time last year, we loved it enough to come again, only this time for a week instead of a weekend. We’re now on Wednesday, on a day Anne and I have deliberately kept free, after a hectic four days of queues and talks. The queuing has been long as nearly all our chosen talks are in the Global Stage, which holds nearly two thousand people. Then, finally, on Tuesday, we found that Anne could sit down on a seat, instead of queuing. She has compression fractures in her back, so it can get painful. People with disabilities, and their helpers go into the auditorium first, which is nice. To be honest, wherever you sit, the sound is excellent, and there are side screens that give a close-up of the speakers. But it is nice to sit down before the masses swarm in.

There is a surprising amount of young people here, which is encouraging. Being as I am firmly now in the middle-aged category, I know very little about what counts as fun for the youth of today. There are also lots of children and tots, and of course, plenty of middle-class, middle-aged people where I guess I place myself. It is still predominantly white, but there do seem to be more brown faces, which is nice.

Initially, my thinking only brings up the word ‘Conversation’ which is banal in its obviousness, but slowly I get the cogs turning a little more laterally.

How about ‘Compassionate’. The Nobel Prizing winning author Abdulrazak Gurnah won that prize for his ‘uncompromising and compassionate penetration of the effects of colonialism and the fates of the refugee’. I had not heard of him before this visit, but as he was in conversation with a favourite writer, Elif Shafak, we went along to the talk and were not disappointed. Both authors are in some sense refugees. Gurnah came here in the sixties escaping the tumultuous Zanzibar revolution, and Shafak, who was born and initially raised in Turkey but cannot return, at least while the current regime is in place.

In their conversation, they did raise their initial experiences of England, summed up by Shafak in the three Rs: Rain, Rudeness and Racism. They both simultaneously love this country now and miss their homelands. As Gurnah pointed out, despite the anti-immigration rhetoric of all the recent British Governments, there are still so many people on the Dover beaches with blankets and food. Their conversation could have been bitter and angry, but it was thoughtful, funny at times, and full of compassion.

‘Challenging’ is another word that suddenly pops into my head. My head was definitely challenged by the issues of social media and AI talked about by Kaitlyn Regehr (Smartphone Nation), and Stephen Fry. Regehr didn’t go down the obvious route of telling everyone to reduce their screen time, although there is an element of that required. She encapsulated the solutions in three words: Education (on how the algorithm pushes content based on attraction – be it positive or negative, and how to ‘game’ the algorithm); Moderation (we need to ask ourselves how much of our screen time is useful and how much is mindless, and try and reduce the mindless part); and Regulation (when Molly Russell’s father went on national television, he could not show the types of websites and videos that were pushed onto the fourteen year old’s Instagram feed because of the regulations around press and media. There are zero regulations around social media, with Meta, defending the openness of the feeds on the grounds of free speech.

The point, Regehr says, isn’t the fact that someone posted a particular piece of content relating to self-harm or suicide, it is the fact that the algorithm bombards one’s feeds with all that content if you so much as hover on it for more than a couple of seconds.

Stephen Fry’s conversation about AI did leave me afraid, and he also wanted more (sorry, ‘any’) regulation to help control, or at the very least label the output of AI. As it came after his reading from his retelling of ‘The Odyssey’, it was a surprising change of mood, but as we all know, he has an intelligence and an inquisitiveness that can develop an expertise in any field.

Naga Munchetty, being interviewed by Kirsty Lang, was ‘Confident’ and ‘Courageous’. As I know from my own experiences, women’s health issues have been very poorly served historically by the National Health Service. Although education of doctors and GPs is improving, there are still a very high number of women who have normalised chronic physical pain because it happens as part of their menstrual cycle.

In her book, she talks to other women, but her own situation was shocking enough. For over thirty years, she suffered debilitating pain monthly and was often physically sick as a result of that pain. Her GP told her to suck it up as the lot of women, until she was scanned for something else and was found to have Adenomyosis. Like Endometriosis, it is an aberration on how the menstrual cycle should work, and at the moment, partly because the amount of research given to women’s health is pitifully low, there is no cure, but there are methods to manage it.

If you consider this example an extreme case, there are also very simple things which do have solutions, such as helping a woman restore her bladder muscles after pregnancy and birth. In France, there is a treatment programme for every woman after she gives birth, which has reduced post-birth bladder and faecal control problems massively. Is there anything like that here? No. There are just Tena ladies and adult nappies.

I could go on a rant with further examples, but I won’t. Naga was angry, articulate, and armed with a heap of tips to help women get heard, and hopefully helped. If I had been asked for adjectives beginning with ‘A’, I think she would have won.

Going back to Tom Holland, we could use the word ‘Classic’ if you added an ‘al’ to the end of it. The biographer Suetonius wrote about twelve Roman leaders whose lives spanned from the last decades of the Republic to the period where absolute power was no longer disguised as anything else. Could history actually be repeating itself, perchance? There was also a fair amount of ‘Comedy’ in it too, as those who are familiar with his ‘The Rest is History’ podcast will not be surprised by.

The dance between the Classical and Comedy was speeded up by Natalie Haynes who is a bona fide Classicist, as well as a standup comedian. Her – let’s call it a ‘show’, because she was in conversation with no-one aside from her brilliantly scattered brain – left me in tears for all the right reasons.

I have by no means talked about all the sessions we went to, as my little blog is overlong already, and I’ve run out of ‘C’ words. If you’re wondering, Anne’s initial three words were ‘Compassion’, ‘Community’ and ‘Connection’ and I can see why she came up with these. I can also see that words such as these are anathemas for the current world leaders and for this I rejoice. These last few days have been uplifting for our souls, even though the news hasn’t all been positive. I feel like I have bathed in this confluence of extraordinary thinkers, writers and presenters, and it gives me a cause for hope.