Hay Days # 1: Visitors
Hay-on-Wye is a popular place with tourists. I worked out this week that come the five weeks starting from my wife’s birthday on the twenty-fifth of July we will have had guests – by which I mean friends and family – staying for twenty-eight out of those thirty-five days. Fair to say this never happened when we lived in the Surrey commuter town of Woking, a place whose main merit is that it is a hub for many other beautiful and interesting locations.
This is not to diss the place. I lived there for thirty-seven years, bought up three children with two different women, and had a safe and happy life. But no-one came to see a town whose chief claim to fame was that its inhabitants were killed off by alien invaders in an act of spite directed by one of the greatest science fiction writers of the Victorian and Edwardian eras. H.G. Wells is celebrated there with statues (despite the fact that he was born in the equally insipid town of Bromley in Kent), but he didn’t like the place and took great pleasure (it is alleged) in zapping the population with three legged Martians and their death rays.
Hay is celebrated for many very different reasons, namely its reputation as a town of books with an internationally famous festival, and its location midway along the Offa’s Dyke path. It is bang in the middle of The Marches, resplendent with ruined castle and bits of old fortifications, a place with a history so violent that Game of Thrones pales in comparison. Nowadays the axes and instruments of torture have been replaced by an astonishing collection of cultural activities and artisan shops, and even the castle and its adjoining Tudor mansion have been renovated for use as a historical centre with a wide range of activities all year ‘round. Men in full armour have been replaced by walkers in vegan boots and brightly coloured rain jackets, bearing nothing more dangerous than Nordic walking poles.
Our first visitors last week hailed from North London but had been road tripping around England before summoning the courage to cross into Wales (Hay is a border town – we live in Powys but our local co-op is walking distance away in Herefordshire). There are a number of differences between Hay and Harrow (where our friends live) which I will not dwell on at the moment since they are too many and too obvious. Chief amongst them is that probably that no-one has advertised a pair of second hand implements for castrating farm animals on the Harrow local facebook group. This was accompanied by a photograph which left nothing to the imagination and bought tears to my eyes (purely for reasons of maleness rather than veganism). But this does illustrate the point that bookish and cultural activities aside, Hay does remain a solidly agricultural community.
Most of our friends were astonished when we moved down here last December. Some were even moved to tears. One female friend was appalled, saying that she had expected to set up home with the girls once all the men had died and how would that work if people kept moving away? The assumption of women outliving men is founded in statistical fact but is cynical nonetheless.
As it turned out one of our friends from Harrow got ill after a couple of days and spent the rest of her time sleeping or playing Kalooki with us. She was animated once disputes about house rules arose, which is a cure of sorts. Once you are moved to argue then you aren’t too ill. If you don’t know Kalooki it is a rummy based game that seems to have been invented by Air Jamaica cabin crew back in the 1970s and was then adopted by elderly Jewish women in North London and America. No-one is quite sure how this happened but the romantic in me likes to think it was the result of a liaison between an older Jewish woman and a Rastafarian steward flying out of Kingston. Nothing like post-coital card games for the transmission of ideas and cultures. Howard Jacobson, four times nominated Booker author, even wrote a novel called Kalooki Nights that celebrated it.
We did all manage the traditional walk down to The Warren. Everyone has to walk to The Warren, it is locally famous as a wild swimming spot on a bend in the Wye with a beach of sorts and sweeping views across meadows and fields. Plus a bit of bookshop browsing is a must after you’ve had your fresh air. Everyone must buy books if they come here. You get checked at the border to make sure you have purchased at least three books during your stay. Anyone who fails to comply has to read John of John by way of punishment, which extends their stay by at least three miserable days.
Our other visitors this week were our son, his partner and their eighteen month old daughter. They are Hay veterans now and know where to get the best pub food, what days Kate the Baker opens, and where the potholes are on The Backfold. This is a narrow pedestrian thoroughfare behind the castle and the potholes are a subject of much controversy since the local authority and the shop owners both deny responsibility for maintaining them.
All this aside, the most happening day in Hay last week was Saturday when the Women’s Cycling Tour of Britain (stage four) had its finish outside the recreation ground. Visitors en masse (not to us but to the town).
The organisation of this was not good but locals stepped into the breach and marshalled the traffic and enforced lucrative charges in local fields for visitors, thus boosting the Hay Christmas Lights Fund by a considerable amount of money. I had planned to photograph the finish of the race but it kept getting delayed so I went and had a beer and some sushi in a garden not far away instead (there is a place run by a man and his Japanese wife and they do regular pop-ups and private dining in their beautiful Georgian house and garden at the top end of town).
After this I went to see a friend who is an accomplished classical pianist perform in St Mary’s Church where there was a wonderful “story with music” of the lives of the Schumanns.
This was the sanitised version of course, which did not mention the fact that he got pissed and caught syphilis when he was a young man, but informative and entertaining for all that. And the musicianship really was excellent. Our neighbour is an unassuming but very talented person in more than one field.
Book of my week was “The Shadow of the Object” by Chloe Aradjis. Loved this. Need to re-read at an early opportunity in fact. There is an implicit theme here that connection between people can happen at any age, any time, anywhere such is our ability as human beings to connect and explore difficult and profound and beautiful feelings. Everyone you encounter can help you create shared experiences rooted in the mysterious business of our brief existence.
Eyecatching 