How it all began

Back in 1988 the Hay Festival was a new addition to the cultural calendar. We went four times in the late 1990s and early years of the millennium, at which time it was held in the local school and venues around the town. We started coming again last year after a long break and found that it had grown enormously and was much more professional, working from a dedicated site a five minute shuttle bus ride up the road; but it has retained the charm and intellectual challenge of those years even though the "Town of Books’ is itself now something of a sideshow to the main event.

If you can’t get here yourself, subscribe to Hay Player - for £10 a year it’s the best value in town when it comes to feeding the brain and soul.

The narrow streets and dusty bookshops remain central to its origins and its history. It was good to spend a bit of time there between events today (apart from the disgraceful lack of easily accessible toilets that is; but I will save that rant for another day). The bookshop of Richard Booth (self styled King of Hay) still has his name on it although he sold it some time ago. Would the festival exist without him having reinvented the town as a self styled literary kingdom? Probably not. Do some googling, it’s a remarkable story.

This morning we saw Fintan O’Toole who gave a very different slant on recent events to other accounts of Brexit we have heard this week. Very good insights, and I do now, at last, understand the Irish border issue. Far too many layers for me to repeat although I did take notes. I particularly liked his scathing account of Boris Johnson’s fabricated prawn cocktail flavoured crisp crisis and the impassioned statement that "gross inequality is not compatible with democracy". 9/10.

The session on Leonardo Da Vinci was an interesting panel discussion but a bit road to nowhere, with Germaine Greer indulging her third age career aspirations to be professionally cantankerous. 6/10.

My final session was a very enjoyable but not particularly new account of D Day by James Holland. He certainly knows his stuff and kept up an exhausting barrage of fact, opinion and conjecture for an hour. 6/10.

Evening was a change of clothes - we got caught in one of Hay’s famous sudden downpours on the way back to the car - and a heartwarming supper.

Another lovely day and I mustn’t forget to mention the lovely staff at The Electric Shop cafe. Oh and we met a fellow blipper! cbimages. That was so nice.