Thursday 25th
We got down to Hay mid afternoon and had our one and only event on the first day with Alastair Campbell and Rafael Behr, both of whom do have books out at the moment. The title of the session was Politics Without Rage, which can be interpreted in a number of ways but which I think means that we Guardian readers are bloody exhausted after seven years of post Brexit vote stupidity and an attempt to turn Britain into a right wing dictatorship led by people who have no idea how to lead and so instead just try and foment hatred of immigrants and create culture wars that don’t exist.
Which of course just goes to show that I still have plenty of rage, and so too has Alastair Campbell if his now famous encounter with Fiona Bruce on Question Time last month is anything to go by (this received more than one mention during the session).
But the fact is we are exhausted and need something other than rage to move forward. A few weeks ago I talked about the significance of September the 10th as a symbolic date when we turn 3,017 days of misery followed by 3,017 days of national disaster on their head and start to move forward. That won’t happen unless we shift from passive anger to practical activism.
It was a very good session, quite far ranging; Behr and Campbell are engaging and both are prepared to acknowledge the need to keep moving in terms of their political opinions. Campbell in particular said that he had gone from being a nay sayer to being in favour of proportional representation.
Audience questions at Hay is an interesting experience. They range from the absurd or long winded to the incisive and well informed. I have been guilty of the former and occasionally achieve the latter. But the fact is a high proportion of the questions are fairly predictable. They probably need a new system where questions can be submitted online during the session and sifted before the best ones are read out by the presenter. But that may be a tech step too far for Hay.
Friday 26th
Believe it or not on Friday we went to a session on the future of the NHS workforce. Talk about busman’s holiday. This had a slightly comical element to it as the two presenters were a nurse turned academic and a GP turned academic respectively. They had clearly rehearsed the thing really thoroughly with the result that it came across about as authentic as an episode of Acorn Antiques, that famous spoof soap opera within a comedy show created by Victoria Wood and Julie Waters. “So Jane I was wondering, quite spontaneously, what you thought of modern techniques of teaching defibrillation to Algerian junior doctors on secondment to frontline Ukrainian Hospitals”. But it was quite good and my soul mate did get a very good question in on this one.
One of the things Hay does quite well is comedy and there was a very funny collection of four standup artists in the evening. I’d never come across them before but in addition to a local Welsh woman in an impossibly tight super sequinned dress, a guy from my old stomping ground of Lewisham, and a self proclaimed angry lesbian from Brighton, there was a completely off-world Australian called Sam Campbell (no relation to Alistair).
Saturday 27th
We started our marathon Saturday with Richard Grant doing a one man show. He appeared on stage in a rather bizarre union jack waistcoat and issuing a few expletives which I didn’t quite get the point of. But it soon turned into a rather wonderful account of his life and his career in the movies, and particularly his forty year marriage which ended tragically eighteen months ago when his wife died of cancer. This brought quite a few of the audience to tears as he visibly choked with emotion.
Interestingly he was a product of the Empire and grew up in Swaziland where his father was a colonial administrator who drank heavily and who on one occasion nearly killed the young Grant in an incident involving a bottle of whisky, a fit of anger and a loaded gun. The way Grant told this bought very audible gasps from the audience. But the boy grew up to be a big puppy of a man and you get the feeling that even now in his sixties he is just bouncing happily through a life of unexpected fame, collecting selfies with A-Listers at awards ceremonies, and indulging his lifelong passion for Barbara Streisand. I think his latest tour has just ended but if he does it again, go book a ticket. Great fun and occasionally choking.
There was a luvvy Shakespeare session in the afternoon. Really enjoyable, with celebs galore including Helena Bonham Carter, Tony Robinson, Sam West, Simon Schama and several others all doing readings. But you do get the feeling that these people are part of a vast network of the great and the good who all went to school together or are related by blood or have shagged, intermarried and frequently retweeted each other. The British class system at its most palpably obvious.
David Milliband and Helen Thompson (author of Disorder: Hard Times in the 21st Century) were very good, gave a thorough analysis of global politics, and were utterly depressing in their early evening session. If you wanted proof that the world was backsliding into autocracy this was made for you. It was ostensibly a conversation about American influence and its decline but it quickly degenerated into a global pen portrait of the new world order that no one who believes in democracy wants. It was a real eye opener to discover that the US inflation reduction act is really a subsidy strategy driven by competition with China for top dog status as Jo Biden tries to wean america off of hydrocarbons and in doing so undermine the Trumpite republican cause. The EU already has a similar plan but the UK, being the world’s noddy no friends, is clueless and in real danger of being left behind. As it is in so many other areas.
Fortunately we had the hilarious Jason Byrne afterwards who rescued us from the prospect of going to bed feeling suicidal. I won’t bother trying to describe him. He’s a one trick humour pony but it’s a very good trick and he had the audience in tears for most of the hour long set.
Sunday 28
We kicked off with Simon Scharma talking for an hour about cholera and bubonic plague. Yes you heard me right. I go on holiday for a fortnight and listen to people talking about terrible diseases. But the whole point of the Hay Festival is to achieve something remarkable, which is to both move out of your comfort zone whilst at the same time coming away feeling intellectually and spiritually nourished. Scharma does this very well in that you always feel he is talking to you very personally and swaggers happily around the stage, not lecturing but gushing with enthusiasm and never using notes or a script. He is also very good at picking out individuals who help him tell the story, usually an underdog or a vilified figure in need of restorative justice. Today he focused on Waldermar Haffkine, a man who did wonders to advance the science and practice of vaccination and saved many lives in India in particular, despite being someone who had was also on the butt end of unfairness and discrimination. These tales of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century always stagger me in their breadth and scope. He started off as a political radical in Odessa, fled across Europe, worked in various laboratories in different countries, and ended up in Bombay. A typically brilliant piece of Scharma storytelling.
In a very different vein the eighty eight year old Michael Parkinson was interviewed – or rather was in conversation with – his son. Also called Michael Parkinson. I really don’t understand why people do that, but anyway they were very very good although they had clearly done this many times before. Parky is now very frail, quite literally half the man he was following an illness, but he addressed that elephant in the room straight away and apologised for being old, breathless and not as intelligible as he once was. This was a brilliant session with lots of anecdotes from both men, some great readings, and some very funny clips from his interviews with celebrities down the years. It also had a remarkable ending as his son walked off, the stage dimmed, and Parky stood centre stage clutching the obligatory Hay flower and just smiled as he received a standing ovation from the audience that lasted several minutes. Wonderful. Quite literally reduced grown men to tears.
Late afternoon I went to a session with Professor Anne Kenny, a practising doctor who has written a book called Age Proof which is about what you can and can’t control about the ageing process. A lot of good and positive stuff here if you want to listen and she delivered it with gusto, good humour and a classically Irish charm. I dashed out and bought the book and may well use it as my bible over the years ahead. Stay positive, have purpose in your life, be sensible about your lifestyle, and have lots of friends of all ages. The rest is out of your control. Oh and find something to laugh about every day. Plus it is all research based and she decluttered the jargon very nicely. Great stuff.
Sunday night’s panel consisted of John Crace (Guardian satrist), Daniel Finkelstein (an intelligent tory peer actually worth listening to) Jess Phillips (the brilliant Brummie MP with attitude and a brain that can’t always keep up with her gob), and host Rosie Boycott. This was a very powerful session, not least in the way that Jess Phillips described how bloody awful life was for so many of her constituents on the breadline and how inequality has got so much worse after thirteen years of Tory misrule. Finkelstein more or less admitted that his party was currently being torn apart by the crackpot right wingers and couldn’t see much hope for it in the short term. And Crace, despite being professionally funny, admitted that the state of the nation actually wasn’t very funny any more. In fact for most people it was very sombre. A great session with an inconclusive ending. You can’t, at the end of the day, turn this all around easily. There is just so much to do.
Monday 29th
Daniel Filkenstein popped up again in the morning being interviewed by his distant cousin, the famous human rights lawyer Phillipe Sands. They knew each other for years before they realised they were related; its another story of European migration driven by wars, pogroms and historical events. Finkelstein’s mother was persecuted by Hitler and his father by Stalin. How they escaped death, got to Europe, met and married and raised a little Tory is a remarkable story. They lived in Brent Cross in a little semi and were sanguine about their experience. Finkelstein described how Ronald Reagan was televised visiting Belsen concentration camp. He called out to his mother at the kitchen sink and asked if she wanted to come and look and she replied “No thanks, I’ve seen it for myself”. That’s what you call dark humour, probably unintended. But another very good session; Sands own family story is just as remarkable and you’ve got to love it when two people with gobsmacking family histories get together and let us eavesdrop. They went to Lviv together as the Ukraine featured heavily in their family histories and told some very funny stories about their travels.
The interview with Jeremy Bowen in the afternoon was similarly fascinating. The man has developed a large belly and a huge white beard so was unrecognisable when he walked on stage but the voice is unmistakable and the stories were chilling. In particular he gave an account of meeting Syria’s Assad and described in detail how the country was run by what was no more than a mafia style family with bags of charm, expensive suits, and absolutely no humanity. Mutilating an opponent and dumping their body on the family doorstep sounds callous enough. But the head of the household being forced to go on tv and thank Assad for letting them have the corpse back at all is just insanely vicious.
This is what I value about Hay. People talking about their experiences, for good or bad, gives you such a powerful insight and a real motivation to find out more. And so many of the events interconnect in their themes and details. Assad and Syria have just been welcomed back into the Arab League after ten years as the gulf states relationship with America and Europe has changed. There is a photograph of him in the Guardian smiling and shaking hands with other Arab leaders. It is a chilling picture. It says fuck decency, stick around long enough and the presidents and prime ministers of the “democracies” will come and go but the dictators will stay in place. Scary stuff.
I finished my day with an artist (Julia Lockheart) and a psychologist (Mark Blagrove) who have collaborated on a wonderful presented book called The Science and Art of dreaming. This was very good. Apparently there are people who think dreams are significant – Freud for instance – and those who think they are not, and are just the garbage from our day that our brains put out when we go to sleep. Blagrove and Lockheart have a different and more humanitarian theory. The big value of dreams is when we share and talk about them with other people. They are one of the things that bring us closer together and help us weave the fabric of society. Fascinating stuff.
Eyecatching 