Hay days

The good news is that the Hay Literary Festival has just started, but the not-such-good news is that it’s online for the second year in a row. Online has many advantages – think of all the people who can now watch the events if they choose, while before it was limited to those who could make their way to a little market town on the Welsh/English border. I’m sure I don’t need to say that the weather was always highly unpredictable: sometimes the sun shone benignly and sometimes the festival-goers trudged through the mud in wellies, as British festival-goers so often do. You don’t need to wear wellies when you’re watching at home, although you might wish to put them on just to get into the spirit of the whole thing.

As ever, the programme offers a wide range of writers, thinkers, scientists, naturalists, academics, artists and even just plain funny people. I like to imagine that when my friends and I attended Hay in person that we chose to watch serious thinkers talking about weighty subjects, but I’m not sure that’s strictly true. I do remember watching a very impressive Mike Berners-Lee, who’d just written his book There’s No Planet B, discussing his ideas for the future of the world, and also Germaine Greer stunning the interviewer and the audience with her outrageous views on sex and rape. I don’t think I’ll ever forget Margaret Atwood, who is so tiny, being followed by her phalanx of handmaidens wherever she went. But it wasn’t always that serious – Michael Palin reminisced about his travels with all the charm you’d expect, Dara Ó Briain did one of the funniest stand-up routines I’ve ever seen and Edmund de Waal (of The Hare with Amber Eyes fame) was one of  the sweetest, most modest and delightful people I’ve ever seen on a Hay stage. Or any stage for that matter.

So, what have I chosen to watch in the privacy of my home, where there is no-one to judge me? Three comedians, one person talking about food, one person talking about travel and a Canadian journalist talking about shopping. It’s not an impressive list, is it? I can’t believe I’m writing this, but I’m particularly interested in the shopping guy, who is called JB MacKinnon. I always wonder why people use their initials rather than their names, but that will have to wait for another blog.

Actually, I’m doing JB MacKinnon a great disservice by calling him the shopping guy – he really isn’t. He’s an environmentalist and I gather that his latest book The Day the World Stopped Shopping is about how we’d all be better off if we just did much less of it. The blurb in the Hay programme says “When Covid brought shopping to a halt, his ideas were tested in real time.” But surely Covid didn’t bring shopping to a halt? We all bought piles of food (to say nothing of the toilet paper) and Amazon recorded even more record profits than usual.

Even I, not a keen shopper, bought some ridiculous things during lockdown that I wouldn’t have bought had I been in my right mind. Since you ask: a record-cleaning set that has yet to be taken out of its box; ridiculous bell-bottom jeans that make me look like a throwback from the 70s; and a Pilates ring. Do I do Pilates? No. Will I ever do Pilates? Unlikely. I’m hoping that JB MacKinnon won’t judge me too harshly. We’ve all been through challenging times.