I spent the Bank Holiday weekend at the Hay Festival, rubbing elbows with the unkindled masses and spotting the odd celebrity far off in the distance.
I swear to God that's Stephen Fry up there, glowing like a Monacan traffic light. That's also the last of the photos I took because this was a festival of words not images and I quite clearly suck at it (see above).
Instead, I'm going to list the various talks and events I went to, especially the ones that involved famous people, who will be denoted in bold so you know to be impressed.
SATURDAY, 23RD MAY
14.00- 14.45
Live recording of The Verb: this was pretty fun, though I mainly booked cos it was a chance to see Stephen Fry for free. He was very good, and read a poem about Englishness and then spoke a little about his favourite words, which were admittedly delightful to the ear. Irvine Welsh was also there and struck me as a surprisingly soft-spoken man given his oeuvre; he read from his new novel and answered questions about writing naturalistic speech which appealed to as both a linguist and a writer incapable of sounding natural even when he's just talking naturally.
14.45-15.30
Live recording of some scenes from a Radio 4 drama: not a scheduled event, just something that happened after they were done recording The Verb. I sat and listened to them perform the scenes and then actually got to say a line because they needed someone in the audience to ask a question. So, yeah, I'm making my Radio 4 debut on Friday at 2.15, in a play that's also starring Ian McMillan and Simon Armitage, making them the most famous people I've acted with, ousting Sportacus.
16.00-17.00
Get Creative and Write a Poem: This was a lot of fun and also lead by Ian McMillan; the poem we wrote, altogether as an audience, was nonsense but at least it rhymed, so it was a lot better than some of the crap I've heard over the years.
20.30-21.30
Stephen Fry, Sandi Toksvig and Guests: Firstly, I object to the title of this show- it seems to suggest a lovely alternate universe where Stephen Fry and Sandi Toksvig have set up home and now regularly invite interesting speakers (and hordes of onlookers) into their living room. Instead, Fry was the host with Toksvig and one other person. So you know, the pluralisation is wrong and also I feel really sorry for that other guy- Mark Goldring- who isn't special enough to get his name in the title. Apart from this, it was actually a very interesting talk about Magna Carta and how to legislate for the rights we want and the changes we so desperately need. Fry was avuncular and delicious as ever, Goldring more or less held his own, at least in terms of delivering information but Toksvig absolutely stole the show- something that would become a habit of hers as the weekend developed. She was warm, she was witty, she was incisive- she even put the Hay festival staff in their place by pointing out how none of their lecterns were tall enough for her. Top marks.
SUNDAY, 24TH MAY
9.30- 10.15
What the Paper Said: A brief look at a newspaper from the same date, eighty one years prior. Relatively interesting, in terms of seeing how reporting has changed, especially in terms of language and presentation, but not delivered in a striking or decisive manner. However, it did give me my new favourite epigram:
The headline pertaining to the stocks on that day. The image of it as an actual newspaper topper was superb: it was written all fancy and bold and just looked a treat. Sadly I can't find it reproduced anywhere online and I don't want to pay for access to that newspaper's archives just for this one, admittedly splendid, turn of phrase. I was tempted to ask the presenter to send me a copy: I want to put it on my business cards."Mainly Dull in Tendency"
11.30-12.30
Andrew Solomon: I'll admit I booked this only to see Stephen Fry once more, as he was interviewing the eponymous speaker. And, yet again, Fry was upstaged by his guest. Andrew Solomon might not be famous enough to earn the bold typography but he should be. He was brilliant- his work was brilliant, his speech was brilliant, his entire outlook on everything seemed to be just brilliant. If everything else at Hay had turned out to be an unmitigated disaster, it would have been worth it to go just to discover him because I plan to track down as much of his work as I can. An absolutely captivating lecture on children who are in some way radically different from their parents, told from the perspective of the parents. If you can find it online, please do; it really was inspiring and opened up so many questions about ideas of genetics and culture and how one may influence the other.
13.00-14.00
Jude Law, Louise Brealey, Sarah Lancashire, Sandi Toksvig, Colm Tóibín, Andrew O’Hagan, Kelvin Jones, Lisa Dwan and Stephen Fry: This is how the title was written on my ticket and so that's how I'll present it although I imagine it was actually called something more appropriate like Letters Live, rather than the title I gave which suggests I somehow managed to score a front-row seat for one of the most star-studded and improbable orgies of all time. No such luck. No, the above were instead reading letters from history (and one from this year, and another from a work of fiction, so they were more just reading letters of any description they fancied). This was an interesting idea and, when executed well, worked fantastically. Jude Law showed off his wit, verve and not inconsiderable acting chops when reading a letter from a Jew exiled from Nazi Germany to the man now occupying his house. Stephen Fry nearly burst into tears when reading the coming out letter of a gay son to his mother who had just joined a campaign for "Decency". And Sandi Toksvig took another cake by reading a two line correspondence about the Suffragette movement:
"There are two, and only two, ways in which this can be done. Both will be effectual. 1. Kill every woman in the United Kingdom. 2. Give women the vote. "
-Bertha Brewster
Sadly, sometimes the format didn't work so well: there was an actress- I don't remember which she was from the melange of names above, and she had the dual misfortunes of having picked the most angsty and therefore alienating pieces and then rather overperforming them. Still, most of the readers were excellent- there is definitely something to be said for short, elegant writings when delivered with a lovely, crisp accent and diction.
14.30-15.30
The Essay: This is the event I remember least. I know it was two people talking about what inspires them to write because the info on the website tells me so. I don't remember who they were or why they write. Oh well.
20.30-21.30
Jo Caulfield: Jo Caulfield is a stand-up comedian; she's apparently been on TV, but I'd never heard of her before I booked this ticket. In her blurb, she claimed her show was about the literary characters with whom she'd fallen in love but it really wasn't. Still, she was funny and that's what really matter with stand-up, I feel.
22.00-23.00
Eric Lampaert's Comedians' Cinema: This was not a show to see with one's parents. That was our first mistake. Our second was to sit in the front row so my parents had to get involved in the show's proceedings. This was an improve troupe trying to act out a movie- in this case, Mary Poppins: there was a lot of potential there, especially in extemporised musical numbers (a la Bert in the beginning of the film) and some of it was met. Some of it was emphatically not. They had the rather inspired idea that the woman playing Mary hadn't seen the film- this could've been brilliantly bizarre and out-of-joint, instead she just sort of shouted that she was 'the best nanny ever' all the time. Not so much satire as character assassination. Still, as with all but the worst improv, the off-the-cuff nature lead to some wonderfully unique one liners, the best of which I have documented below and no, you don't get context because, as I already said, it can be the enemy of splendour.
MONDAY, 25TH MAY"Look, it's the sexy, uncomfortable bird; I remember that from the film!"
10.00-11.00
Tom Holland, Bettany Hughes, Peter Stothard Fictions – Mary Renault: In this talk, Bettany Hughes, who was a witty and eloquent woman, spoke out in favour of historical inaccuracy in the service of a better narrative and the power that fiction has to transport, transform and transcend. Great, right? Well, Peter Stothard, who gets no bold font as a punishment for tedium, was a boring old sod who kept on manterrupting her and whining about preserving the truth. I wanted to slap him. Tom Holland was also there, but I don't remember him talking, so, y'know, no bold for him either because he may well have been a mannequin.
14:30-15.30
Nicola Clayton and Clive Wilkins Memory and Mental Time Travel: Definitive proof that speaking about something interesting in an interesting way is not the same as being interesting. Clayton and Wilkins deployed every trick imaginable- staged readings, play acting, blue jays, magic tricks and, I'm not kidding, an actual five minute argentine tango- to try and balance out their own innate monotony. It didn't work. I really wanted to retain more of this lecture than I did- after all, memory defines us in a very concrete way and I like to know about how my self comes to be- but, somewhat ironically, it was very unmemorable.
16.00-17.00
Sandi Toksvig: By now I was wise to Sandi Toksvig's tricks of being effervescent, forthcoming, cutting, informative and welcoming all at the same time and so I was ready, but somehow she still managed to completely blindside me and convince me that she would make absolutely the best Prime Minister ever. Much like Jo Caulfield, she purported to structure her talk around the books that have shaped her- unlike Caulfield, she delivered. She was utterly magnificent and her speech, which I presume she wrote, was some of the best politic rhetoric I have ever heard and that was just when she was talking about Little Women. Please God, Ms. Toksvig, follow your political aspirations and put the country right. We need you.
So, that was my experience of Hay- overall, a very expensive way to make yourself feel stupid. I can't reccommend it highly enough.
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